Kept Picks exists to answer one question: “Which one should I actually get?”
The internet is full of “best of” lists that were written in an afternoon and never touched again. We take the opposite approach. We publish fewer comparisons, keep them current, and remove products that stop earning their place. That’s where the name comes from — we only keep the picks worth keeping.
Who writes this
Founder & sole author. About ten years building and maintaining websites; I build and run this one myself. Systeme.io is the one tool here I have used in my own account — every other page says what it is based on.
Kept Picks is written by Shinya Hatano. I’ve been building and maintaining websites for about ten years. The first one is still online a decade later, and I still fix it when something breaks — which is how I learned that the interesting part of any platform is not the launch, it’s year three. I co-owned that site’s business, though I am not a co-owner today; the business itself has since closed. Separately, I have also run an online store on Shopify, until the fees pushed me onto a different payment system. Today I choose the host, the theme and write the plugins that run this site, and I pay for the tools I test out of my own pocket.
That is the whole credential, and it is deliberately narrow. I am not an agency, a marketing consultancy, or a content studio. I am the person on the other side of these products — the one who gets the message saying payments have stopped working, and is still awake five hours later when they start again.
Most comparison articles in this space are written by marketers writing about marketing. This one is written by someone who has to keep the thing running after everyone else has gone to bed.
What we cover
Software, online services, and everyday tools — the kind of purchases where the options look identical on the surface and the differences only show up after you’ve paid. Our job is to surface those differences before you buy.
How we work
The short version is below. The long version — our three tiers of evidence, what we have actually run an account on, and how to check us — is on how we test.
- Research first. Every comparison starts with documentation, pricing pages, changelogs, and real user feedback — not press releases. Prices are checked against the vendor’s own page and dated, so you can tell when a number has gone stale.
- Criteria that age well. We weigh long-term factors: total cost of ownership, reliability, support quality, and how easy it is to switch away.
- Fewer, better picks. Most products we evaluate never appear on the site. A short list you can trust beats a long list that hedges.
- We say when we’re wrong. When we get something wrong, we correct it in place and note what changed. There is no version of this that involves quietly editing the record. Every page’s price-check date is collected on our changelog.
How we make money
Some links on Kept Picks are affiliate links: if you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Commissions never decide our rankings — plenty of our picks earn us nothing at all, and we recommend staying put whenever switching is the wrong call. The full policy is in our Affiliate Disclosure.
Talk to us
Found an error? Think a pick no longer deserves its spot? I want to know. Reach me any time at hello@keptpicks.com or through the contact page.
See what made the cut
Every pick on this site survived the process above. Start with the latest comparisons.
Kept Picks is an independent publication, operated from Japan, written in English for readers worldwide. It is not affiliated with, or owned by, any of the companies reviewed here.