How We Review
The short version: we use the product before writing about it. Not a free trial over a long weekend. We sign up like a normal customer, pay the normal price, and put it through real work.
You’d think that would be obvious, but plenty of review sites skip that part entirely. This page exists so you can see what actually goes into our reviews and judge the process for yourself.
Picking what to review
We go after products people are most likely weighing up right now. The well-known names first, then smaller alternatives that we think deserve a closer look. Reader requests matter too — if a few people ask about the same product, it gets bumped up the list.
Testing
We pay out of pocket. No free review accounts, no press access, no special demo environments set up for us. On the rare occasion we can’t avoid a vendor-supplied account — some enterprise tools don’t sell individual plans — we say so in the review.
What testing actually looks like varies. With hosting, it means running real websites on real servers with real traffic and watching performance over time. Email platforms get tested with live campaigns. AI tools get dropped into our own content workflows. Point is, we use the product the way a paying customer would, not the way a guided demo makes it look.
Where numbers matter, we track them. Server response times, GTmetrix results, load speeds, uptime. All measured on live sites, not in a lab. We also compare each product against its direct competitors, because reviewing something in a vacuum doesn’t help anyone.
Scoring
Everything gets a score out of 10. We look at five areas: how well it performs and how reliable it is, what features you get for the price, how steep the learning curve is (especially for beginners), whether the pricing holds up past the introductory offer, and what happens when you contact support with a real problem.
Weighting depends on the product category. Server speed matters more in a hosting review than in an email tool review, obviously. But the same five areas apply everywhere.
A 7.3 is a 7.3. We don’t round anything up.
What we won’t do
Review something we haven’t tested enough. If we can’t back up an opinion yet, we’d rather wait than guess.
Pretend a product is great when it isn’t. Every review lays out the good and the bad, and we try to be specific about who should and shouldn’t bother with it. The affiliate side of things is handled separately — see the Affiliate Disclosure.
Updates
Products change all the time. A review written six months ago might already have outdated pricing or features. We go back and revise, and each review shows when it was last touched. If you spot something we’ve missed, let us know.
Questions
Want to know how we tested something specific, or think we got it wrong? Email info@reviewbridge.com.