Editorial policy
Every status on Verdict is a claim you can check. This page says how each one is decided, where the evidence comes from, and why the money stays out of it.
The five statuses
A tool holds one of five statuses: live, price-hiked, degrading, sunset-announced, or dead. Each one is a plain fact about where the tool stands right now, not an opinion about it.
Live means reachable and working. Price-hiked means a confirmed, dated price increase. Degrading means dated signals of decline. Sunset-announced means the vendor has named an end date. Dead means the tool has shut down.
Every status carries a date and a primary source. If a claim cannot be dated and sourced, it does not go on the page.
How a status is sourced
We work from primary sources: the vendor's own pricing page, changelog, status page, blog post, or a first-hand shutdown notice. Not a rumor, and not a screenshot with no link.
Each source is dated. When a better source appears, we update the dated facts on the page.
An outage is not a death. A tool that is briefly unreachable stays live. A single failed check never changes a verdict on its own.
Dead and sunset are set by a person
A dead or sunset-announced status is only ever set by the editor, by hand, after checking the evidence. No automated script can mark a tool dead.
Our system can flag a tool from dated signals and propose the change. A person reviews the evidence and approves it before anything is published. The other three statuses can move from checks, but a death is always a human call.
Checked twice a day, changed when the facts change
Reachability is re-checked twice a day from two independent servers on different networks. Two servers having to agree is what keeps one bad network moment from reading as a death.
The editorial content of a page changes only when the underlying facts change. A new price, a shutdown notice, a fresh decline signal: that is when a page is rewritten and re-dated. With no new facts, the page stays as it is.
How a tool enters a ranking
Ranking is by relevance and status first. A tool has to be reachable and verified to place at all. Dead and degrading tools are tracked, but they are never recommended.
Affiliate availability and commission never affect inclusion, a verdict, or a position in any ranking. A tool with no affiliate program is judged by the exact same criteria as one that pays.
Independence, privacy, and reuse
Outbound links to tools route through a /go/ redirect marked rel="sponsored nofollow", and the disclosure sits in every footer. Money from those links is kept away from both the ranking and the verdict.
We store no visitor IP addresses, set no cookies, and run no third-party trackers. Page views are counted first-party, storing only the path, not the person. An email is kept only if you subscribe to alerts, through double opt-in, sent via Resend.
The dataset of dead, sunset, and declining tools, with their dates and sources, is reusable under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. There is a free JSON status API with no key at /api/v1/status/{slug}, and a plain-text mirror at /api/md/.
Verdict's editorial desk maintains the registry and sets every verdict by hand. The legal entity behind Verdict and its governing law will be named here once confirmed.