How reader reports work
Crowd data is only worth anything if it's honest. These are the rules we hold ourselves to, published so you can hold us to them too.
What we ask for, and what we refuse#
We ask what you paid, what it included, and how the service handled billing, cancellation, shipping, and support. We refuse health information — no weight, no side effects, no dosing, no medical outcomes. Submissions containing it are rejected in moderation. We don't want that data, we don't store it, and testimonial-style health claims are exactly what makes health sites untrustworthy.
The rules#
- No incentives. We never pay, discount, or reward reports. Incentivized reviews are both a legal problem and a credibility problem.
- Human moderation, always. Nothing auto-publishes. Every report is read against a published checklist.
- Providers can't edit or delete. A company may submit a response, which we publish labeled as theirs. That's the extent of their power here.
- Aggregates, not anecdotes. We publish medians, ranges, and sample sizes — a single report never moves a headline number.
- Minimum sample sizes. Price aggregates need at least 3 reports; service ratings need at least 10. Below that we say so rather than implying a pattern.
- Community data never overrides verification. Our checkout-verified prices stay authoritative; reader reports appear beside them, labeled as self-submitted and unverified.
- Outliers get scrutiny, not deletion. An unusual number is often the most useful thing we receive.
What gets rejected#
Health details. Identifying information about you or a named employee. Competitor attacks and provider astroturf (we watch submission patterns and timing clusters). Defamatory factual claims we can't support. Links. Anything over the length cap.
Why we built it this way#
The sites we compete with publish star ratings nobody can audit, and some publish reviews of themselves. A crowd price record is more useful than either — it's checkable, it improves the index, and it belongs to readers rather than to marketing budgets. The full internal design, including moderation mechanics, is in our repository as a public document.