Editorial policy

How we decide what to recommend

This page explains, in plain language, how a tool ends up ranked on Solo Tool Stack — what we look at, what we ignore, and how we keep affiliate revenue from quietly bending our rankings.

1. We evaluate for one reader: the solo founder

Enterprise buyers and solo founders need different things from the same software category. A tool that's "best" for a 200-person marketing team can be the wrong choice for someone doing marketing, sales, and support alone. Every recommendation on this site is filtered through a single persona: a solo founder or one-person business, usually pre-revenue to a few hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue, with no dedicated ops, legal, or IT staff.

2. Our scoring criteria

We weigh five factors for every tool we cover. We don't publish a single blended numeric score — a tool can win on price and lose on support, and we'd rather show you that tradeoff than flatten it into one number.

• Price at solo scale. Not the enterprise tier — the actual plan a one-person business would sign up for, including what happens when a free tier's limits are hit.
• Time to first value. How long it realistically takes one person with no technical team to get useful output from the tool.
• Ceiling. Whether the tool still works once you have real customers, or whether you'll be migrating again in a year.
• Support quality without an account manager. Solo founders don't get a dedicated success rep. We look at self-serve documentation and support responsiveness at the entry tier specifically.
• Exit cost. How hard the tool makes it to export your data and leave, because lock-in risk is a real cost of adoption.

3. How we research

Where possible, we use free trials, public sandbox accounts, and documented pricing pages to verify claims directly rather than repeating vendor marketing copy. We cross-check pricing and feature claims against the vendor's current public pricing page at the time of writing, and we note the review or last-checked date on pages where it matters. Software pricing changes often — if you find a stale price, please tell us.

4. Editorial independence from affiliate revenue

Our writers and editors decide rankings before any affiliate program is applied to a page. In practice that means:

• We do not accept payment in exchange for a specific ranking, rating, or "best" placement.
• A tool with no affiliate program at all can still be ranked first if it's genuinely the best option — see our affiliate disclosure for how we handle this in practice.
• We name credible runner-up and "skip this if..." options instead of only promoting the highest-commission choice.

5. Updates and corrections

We plan to revisit guide pages periodically as vendors change pricing or ship major features. Because this is a new publication, treat the "last reviewed" context on each guide as our best good-faith effort rather than a guarantee of same-day accuracy. Corrections are always welcome via our contact page.

6. What we don't do

• We don't publish "sponsored" placements disguised as independent rankings.
• We don't fabricate customer testimonials, review scores, or usage statistics.
• We don't claim a formal partnership with a vendor unless one genuinely exists and is disclosed.