How ToolGPA works

Prices, plan names, free-plan limits, trial terms, supported platforms and integrations are read from each vendor’s own website: its pricing page, its download page and its feature pages. Every tool page ends with the list of pages its facts were read from.

Prices are recorded as the vendor displays them, in US dollars wherever the vendor publishes a dollar price (a few list only euros or pounds), with the billing basis spelled out, because a price “per month” often means per month when you pay for a year. For a few tools the vendor’s own pricing page could not be read; those listings say so and name the source that was used instead.

Listings are researched with AI assistance, working only from the pages cited.

Product images are the picture each tool’s own website publishes for link previews. Logos are the product’s icon from its own App Store listing where it has one, and otherwise the icon its website declares (read from the site, or from Google’s saved copy of it). They belong to their owners. If one of them is yours and you would like it changed or removed, email hello@example.com.

Some tools carry our own review. To write one we go through the product’s own pages in full: what it says it does, its pricing, its help centre and its release notes. We then read what its users write in App Store reviews and public discussions. The review is written by us from those, with AI assistance, and every review ends by saying what it rests on.

Most products have been read about, not used: we do not sign up for every tool on the site. A review says plainly whether we used the product. Where it says we did not, treat it as a careful reading of the public record, not a test.

Each review grades five things from A to F:

• Value for money. What the paid plans cost against what they give, and against what rivals charge for the same.
• Free plan and trial. How far a person gets without paying, and how fairly the limits are drawn.
• Features. How much it does for the job it is for, and how well its own documentation shows it doing it.
• Ease of use. How quickly a new user is productive, going by its onboarding, its help pages and what users report.
• Platforms and integrations. Which devices it runs on, what it connects to and whether it has an API.

A tool’s GPA is the average of those five grades, with an A worth 4 points, a B 3, a C 2, a D 1 and an F none. Nothing else goes into it, so you can always see why a tool scored what it did.

Pictures in a review are the product’s screens from its maker’s own App Store listing, and our own captures of its public pages. Each is dated.

Every tool shows the date it was last checked; the most recent check was Oct 6, 2026. Software pricing changes often, so treat the date as part of the fact, and confirm on the vendor’s site before you buy.

Guides are shortlists. Each pick is there because of something specific in its listing, such as a platform it supports, how its free plan is limited or a feature its rivals lack, and each pick says what that is and what to watch out for.

We give no star ratings or number scores of our own, and we do not claim to have used every tool day to day. A guide tells you which tools fit which situation and why, so you can check the reasoning yourself.

Head-to-head comparisons, and alternatives pages for tools that have no written guide, are built directly from the listings. They state where two listings differ and nothing more.

Some categories open with our top three. That ranking is a judgement, and it is made from two things only: what each tool’s own pages show (price, free plan, platforms, features and limits) and what people say about it in public reviews and discussions. It is not based on our own testing.

First place goes to the tool that suits the most people. Second and third go to the best choices for the readers the first one leaves out, such as people who want to pay nothing or who work on one kind of device. Each place says who it is for and why it sits there, and the summary names anything that narrowly missed. Where the top two are close, we say so.

Each ranking carries the date it was made, and is revisited as tools are added and prices change.

Where a tool page shows a rating, it is the App Store’s rating of the tool’s iPhone, iPad or Mac app, copied from the tool’s own listing together with the number of ratings behind it and the date it was read. It is shown only where at least 300 people have rated the app, because a companion app that a few dozen people have rated says little about a tool that is mostly used in a browser. It is not a score of ours.

The praise and complaints listed beside it are themes that come up repeatedly in App Store reviews and in public discussions such as Hacker News. They are summarised in our own words, each with a link to where it was said, and the page says how much was read. A few dozen reviews are not a survey, so treat them as pointers to read further, not as a verdict.

Ways to save lists only what a vendor states publicly: free plans, free trials, annual-billing discounts, and education, nonprofit and startup pricing. Each entry links to the page it was read from. There are no coupon codes.

We count how many times each tool’s page is viewed and how many times someone goes from it to the vendor’s site, as totals. There are no cookies, and nothing is kept about who a visitor is. A tool page shows its totals once there are enough of them to mean something.

If a price has changed, a platform is missing or a tool should be here and is not, email hello@example.com with a link to the vendor’s page and we will update the listing.

If you make one of the tools listed here, you can claim its listing and send corrections from a dashboard. Each one is checked against a public page before the listing changes.