methodology and disclosures
how the rankings are made, how we make money, and what would make us change our mind.
what these rankings actually are
these are editorial rankings built from primary-source research and hands-on use. they are not the output of a controlled laboratory benchmark, and we don't want to imply otherwise — plenty of review sites publish precise-looking accuracy percentages that no reader can reproduce, and we'd rather tell you exactly where our numbers come from.
for every entry we read the vendor's own pricing page, the actual licence file where one exists, and the product documentation. where a category has credible independent measurement — public leaderboards with large vote pools, for example — we use it and say so. where it doesn't, the ranking is a considered opinion informed by the above, and the entry reads like one.
we read the licence, not the launch blog
this is the part of the process that has caught the most real errors, and it is unglamorous: we open the LICENSE file rather than trusting the announcement.
in 2026 those two things disagree constantly. black forest labs' own flux.2 post reads as though the downloadable model is apache 2.0; the licence on hugging face is non-commercial. fal's model pages describe ltx-2 as apache 2.0; the actual licence carries a $10m revenue gate and an anti-competition clause. ideogram 4 is widely reported as commercially usable open weights; the model cards say non-commercial. tencent's hunyuan licence excludes the eu, the uk and south korea outright, which almost no coverage mentions.
if you take one thing from this site, take that habit rather than our rankings.
what the score means
scores run 0–100 and are only comparable within a category. an 85 for an image model and an 85 for a verification tool are not the same measurement and shouldn't be compared across lists.
a score weighs capability, operational reality — reliability, latency, support, how bad the failure modes are — and what the tool costs at a realistic volume rather than at its headline entry tier.
viability counts too. a genuinely excellent product with a published shutdown date, a licence you can't ship on, or no api to build against will rank below its raw capability, and the entry will say that is why.
what we don't claim
we don't publish measured figures we didn't produce. if you see a percentage on this site, it comes from a named source — a vendor's own claim, a public leaderboard, or a licence or pricing document — and the entry says which.
where we couldn't verify something, the entry says so rather than filling the gap with a plausible number. there are several of those on this site by design: reve's per-image price for version 2.1 isn't published anywhere we could reach, minimax sells video generation in opaque 'points' with no per-second rate, and midjourney blocks automated access to its own pricing page.
gaps are more useful than confident guesses, and they're honest about where a reader should go and check for themselves.
how this site makes money
advertising, and affiliate links on some outbound vendor links, where we may earn a commission if you sign up after clicking through.
commercial arrangements have no input into ranking, scoring, or copy. if that ever changes for a specific entry, that entry will say so on its face rather than in a footer.
where we operate the tool ourselves, the entry carries a 'we own this' badge and a disclosure at the top of it. currently that applies to the free email checker at verifier.org, which sits tenth in its own category because that is roughly where its capability lands.
vendors don't get a preview
no vendor sees a ranking, a score, or a review before it publishes, and no vendor can make a re-review a condition of anything.
we correct factual errors quickly, from anyone. if a price, a limit, a licence term or a feature claim is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — this category moves fast enough that some of it will be wrong by the time you read it.
when rankings change
we re-check a ranking when something material happens — a major version, a pricing change, a licence change, an acquisition, or a shutdown announcement — not on a calendar.
the date on each ranking is when we last went through every figure on that page. if it looks old, treat it as old; that date is the most honest signal on the page.