Most review sites imply they tested everything. We are going to tell you exactly what we tested, exactly what we only read, and how to tell which is which on any page of this site.
This page exists because the alternative is worse. A site that claims hands-on testing of forty products has either tested none of them properly or is not telling you the truth, and you have no way to check. So here is our evidence hierarchy, in plain language, with the current status of every claim category we publish.
Our three tiers of evidence
Tier 1 — We set up an account and used it
The strongest thing we can offer, and the rarest. It means a real account, real screenshots with dates in the caption, and a written record of where we got stuck — not just where it went well. Right now exactly one product on this site is Tier 1: Systeme.io’s free plan.
What that account actually told us, and none of it came from a marketing page:
- The free plan will not send email until you verify a domain. The sender dropdown is simply empty — not explained, not linked, just empty. “Unlimited emails” has an unstated prerequisite.
- Choosing a funnel goal auto-generates two pages — opt-in and thank-you, with a template attached. You do not start from blank.
- Sub-accounts really are unlimited on the free plan, with no approval step. We created one to check, because it sounded too generous to be true.
- The page editor opens the whole section’s settings when you click a headline, rather than a text toolbar. Minor, but it is the kind of thing that costs you twenty minutes on day one and appears in no comparison table.
Tier 2 — We read the vendor’s own pages closely, and dated it
This is what every head-to-head comparison on this site is. Kartra, ThriveCart, Podia, Teachable, Thinkific, GetResponse, MailerLite, Kit, Stan Store, Skool, ClickFunnels, Shopify, Wix, WordPress — we do not have current accounts on any of these, and every price and limit we publish about them comes from their own pages. Two of them come with a caveat in our favour, and we flag it on the pages themselves rather than here: we have years of first-hand experience of a Wix site we still maintain, and some older first-hand experience of Shopify’s payments side. Neither is a current account, so neither is Tier 1. What we do instead:
- Prices come from the vendor’s own pricing page, checked on the day the article publishes, with that date printed at the bottom of the page. Not from an aggregator, not from another blog, not from memory.
- We read closely enough to catch vendors contradicting themselves. Systeme.io’s FAQ says the $17 plan has unlimited funnels; its own pricing table says 10. Systeme.io’s affiliate page says there is no waiting period after a conversion; its affiliate agreement specifies 30 days. We print both and say which is which.
- We do not repeat numbers the vendor never published. Half the internet says ClickFunnels has a “14-day trial.” Its pricing page promises a free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee, and no number. So that is what we print.
- Every Tier 2 page says so at the top, in a grey box, naming the product and stating plainly what we did and did not use. Where we have older first-hand experience but no current account, the box says that too, rather than letting it read as a live test.
Tier 3 — Things we will not publish at all
- Prices from third-party aggregator sites. They go stale silently and nobody corrects them. If a vendor does not publish a number, we write that the number is not published.
- Invented experience. No “in my years running X” unless there were years and there was an X. This sounds obvious. It is the single most common failure in this entire category.
- Star ratings and scores out of ten. They compress away the only thing that matters — which one is right for you — and they are trivially gameable.
How to check us
- Look for the grey box under the disclosure line. If it is there, the page is Tier 2 and says so. If it is not there, the page concerns Systeme.io and is built on our own account.
- Look at the date at the bottom. Every page carries the date its prices were last checked against the vendor’s page. If that date is old, treat the numbers as old.
- Check a screenshot’s caption. Ours are dated. If a screenshot has no date, it is not evidence, on this site or any other.
A note on currency
Some vendors price by country and serve a different number depending on where you open their page from. Shopify is the clearest example. When that happens we say so, print what we were actually served, and tell you to check your own country’s page — rather than converting a figure and presenting it as a price you will be charged. Where we do convert, we name the rate and the date we used.
How affiliate links work here
Some links earn us a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Three things follow from that, and we would rather you hold us to them than take our word for it:
- Every affiliate link is marked, at the link, not only in a footer. Full policy in our Affiliate Disclosure.
- Most of what we recommend earns us nothing. We have no commercial relationship with most of the products compared on this site, and we still recommend them where they are the better answer — Wix for a designed website, Shopify for anything you ship, WordPress for anything you publish.
- “Stay where you are” is a valid conclusion and appears on this site more than once. Switching costs are real and usually underestimated.
When we get it wrong
We correct it in place and say what changed. We do not quietly edit the record, and we do not delete a page to make an error disappear. Our changelog lists every page with the date its prices were last checked, generated from the articles themselves rather than kept by hand — so anything going stale shows up there whether we like it or not. If you find something on this site that is out of date, unclear, or simply wrong, tell us — corrections from readers are the cheapest quality control there is, and we would rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
Last updated September 6, 2026. 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.