How a guide gets written here.

Sources, in order of trust

1. The vendor's own pricing page and plan documentation. Every price we print starts here, and the article says when it was checked.
2. The vendor's help center and product pages for feature claims — what a plan includes is what the vendor documents, not what its ads promise.
3. Independent reports (review platforms, trade publications, other comparison sites) — used only where a vendor publishes nothing, and always labeled as reported figures.
4. Operator experience — the editor's nine years on the office side of a plumbing company informs the judgments and the "watch for" sections. It never invents a number.

Date-stamping and updates

Pricing guides carry the month their figures were verified. When a vendor changes a price, renames a plan or moves a feature between tiers, the affected guides get updated and their "updated" date moves — silently fixing a price without moving the date would be exactly the kind of thing this site exists to call out. If you catch a stale figure before we do, the contact page is the fastest fix in publishing.

Rankings

Verdicts follow the shop, not the spreadsheet: a tool wins a comparison for a named company size and shape ("best for a three-truck residential shop"), never in the abstract. Where two tools are genuinely even, the guide says so and moves to the deciding factors — pricing model, contract terms, the app your techs will tolerate. Affiliate commissions play no part in any ranking; the affiliate disclosure covers how the money works.

What we never do

• No paid placements, sponsored rankings or "featured partner" slots.
• No invented statistics, user counts or savings claims. If a number cannot be traced to a named source, it does not run.
• No copied vendor copy. Descriptions are rewritten from the documentation and our own testing notes, in our own words.
• No legal, tax or licensing advice. The start-and-grow guides explain processes; your state board and your accountant decide your case.