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Editorial standards

How we review AI tools

Every rating on this site is a judgement someone made after using the product. This page explains how, who pays for it, and what we will not do at any price.

Last reviewed · covers all 39 reviews and every ranking

  1. A person uses the tool

    Every review starts with signing up and doing a real task. Not reading the marketing site, not summarising a press release, not asking a model what it thinks. It is the slowest possible way to build a directory and the only one that produces something worth reading.

  2. Every price is verified and dated

    We read the vendor's own pricing page and record the date. 39 of 39 tool pages carry a check date today. Where a cap is vague we describe its shape honestly — "throttles after a burst, then downgrades the model" — rather than inventing a number that looks precise.

  3. The watch-outs are published

    All 39 reviews carry a watch-outs section, and 39 say plainly who should skip the tool. This is the section nobody else writes, and it is the reason the positive sections mean anything.

  4. The rating is an opinion, and says so

    It is ours, stated as ours. There is no weighted formula behind it, because there is no honest way to reduce "is this worth your afternoon" to arithmetic — and a fake formula is worse than a frank judgement.

  5. Nothing here is for sale

    No paid listings, no sponsored placement, no paid submissions, no bid-per-click featured slots. Competitors charge hundreds of pounds a listing and auction their front page; that is precisely why the market calls directories convenient but untrustworthy.

  6. Dead products stay, marked dead

    1 page in the catalogue currently carries a retirement notice. A review of something that no longer exists is the worst failure available to a site selling accuracy, and the fix is to say so rather than to delete the evidence.

The review process, step by step

A review is finished when a reader could make a decision from it. That is the standard; the steps are how we get there.

  1. Sign up as a normal user. Free tier where there is one, paid where there is not. Never a vendor-provided account, because a demo tenant with the limits lifted is not the product a reader will get.
  2. Do a real task. Something we would otherwise have done another way, so there is a comparison to make. A tool that is impressive in a demo and useless on Tuesday morning is a common outcome and worth reporting.
  3. Find the limits. Where does the free tier stop, what does the cap actually mean, what breaks first. This is the part most reviews skip and the part readers most need.
  4. Verify the facts against the vendor. Prices, plan names, model list, platforms. Read from the vendor's own pages and stamped with the date. Doing this is how we found that one product we were reviewing had been retired, and another had been renamed and its domain redirected.
  5. Write the watch-outs first. Deliberately, because the strengths are easy and the weaknesses are what a reader is paying attention for.
  6. Place it against its rivals. A rating in isolation means nothing. It has to survive being put next to the other 38 tools we cover.

How comparisons are made

A head-to-head page is only published when we can say what actually decides it. Not a feature matrix — the two or three axes on which a real person's answer would change, and concrete conditions for each side ("you already pay for the other one", not "you want quality").

That is enforced rather than intended: our content schema requires at least three deciding factors and two specific conditions per side before a comparison page will build at all. A page that only tabulates two sets of specifications is doorway content, and the specifications are already on both review pages.

The pairs are chosen, not enumerated. Thirty-nine tools produce hundreds of possible matchups and almost none of them are questions anyone asks. We publish the ones people are actually weighing.

How rankings are decided

Category rankings — the "best X tools" pages — are built from the catalogue's data, but every judgement on them is written by hand for that page: why each tool holds its position against these rivals, and what genuinely separates the options. The schema requires it, so a ranking we cannot give a real opinion about does not get published.

Position is not for sale and never correlates with anything commercial. The build refuses to rank a retired product, or a tool from outside the category, which is a guard against the specific mistake of leaving a dead recommendation at the top of a list.

Conflicts of interest

PromptHive has no investors, no parent company and no commercial relationship with any tool it reviews beyond ordinary affiliate programmes. Nobody on the editorial side holds equity in a reviewed company. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the affected pages, not in a footnote here.

We accept no free accounts, no press trips, no gifted hardware and no early-access deals that come with conditions attached. Where a vendor offers a review licence we buy the plan instead, because the version with the limits lifted is not the version you get.

Sponsored content policy

There is none. No sponsored reviews, no paid placement, no "partner posts", no advertorial, and no way to buy a rating, a ranking or a listing. We are asked; the answer is no.

What does fund the site: display advertising, in fixed slots that never sit above the article and never interrupt a verdict, and affiliate links, disclosed in the footer of every page and added only after a review is written. An advertiser cannot buy editorial coverage, and an affiliate programme's commission rate has never been an input to a rating.

If a tool we rate 4.5 pays nothing and a tool we rate 2 pays generously, the ratings stay where they are. That is the arrangement, and it is the only one under which any of the rest of this page means anything.

How prices are verified

Pricing is the fastest-rotting information in this category and the reason most directories are quietly wrong. Our approach is unglamorous: read the vendor's own pricing page, record what it says, record the date, and publish both.

  • The date is shown on the page, so you can judge the figure's age yourself.
  • Vague caps are described as vague. We do not invent a number to look authoritative.
  • Where a "free" plan needs a card, or an "unlimited" plan has an asterisk, that is stated in the plan table rather than in a footnote.
  • Currency is the vendor's own, not converted, because conversion adds an error we cannot date.

How information stays current

Three mechanisms, in ascending order of reliability:

  1. Founders telling us. The most efficient by a wide margin. A vendor knows their price changed on the day it changed; we find out weeks later. This is why the submission system exists as much as for new tools.
  2. Scheduled re-verification. Prices are re-checked as part of ordinary editorial work, and anything without a recent check date is visible to us as a gap.
  3. Automated lifecycle checks. Fetching each tool's URL and flagging cross-host redirects and dead links, which is how a renamed product gets caught before a reader hits it. Built, and steadily expanding — three products have been found retired or renamed so far, each of which had been quietly wrong.

Found something wrong?

Tell us and we will check it. A specific correction — "the Pro plan is $24 now, here is the page" — gets fixed the same week, and the check date on the review moves with it.aidecoded.global@gmail.com or thecontact page.

Questions about all this

Can a company pay to be listed on PromptHive?
No. There is no listing fee, no sponsored placement, no paid review and no "featured" slot for sale. This is a permanent position, not current pricing.
Do you make money from the tools you review?
Some outbound links earn affiliate commission, and the site carries display advertising. Both are disclosed. Neither influences whether a tool is listed, what it scores, or where it ranks — affiliate links are added after a review is written, never before.
How are the ratings calculated?
They are not calculated. A rating is our stated opinion after using the tool, weighed against the others in its category on the same basis. Presenting a judgement as a formula would be a small dishonesty that undermines everything around it.
How current is the pricing?
Every price carries the date we last checked it against the vendor's own pricing page. If a date looks old, treat the figure as indicative and tell us — we would rather re-verify than be wrong.
What happens if a tool you recommend shuts down?
The page stays, marked as retired, with what happened and what to use instead. People still search the name, and deleting the page would leave them with nothing. Roughly 40% of listings across this category are dead links that still read as live recommendations; that is the failure this policy exists to avoid.
Can a vendor get a negative review removed?
A factual error, yes — immediately, and we will say what changed. A judgement they disagree with, no. That distinction is the whole of our editorial policy in one sentence.

If you have built one of these

Everything above applies to submitted tools exactly as it applies to the ones we found ourselves. Submitting is free, confers nothing, and gets you a decision with a reason attached.Submit your AI tool, or readhow to get your AI tool featured first — it is the more useful of the two if you have not submitted anywhere before.