How we verify every rule. No value is ever hand-typed into a tool or page — everything renders from a record with a source and a date.
Every fact is stored in an 'envelope': the exact value, the deep link to its source, whether that source is primary or secondary, the verification date, and an archived screenshot as evidence. Without the envelope, the fact doesn't exist for us.
VERIFIED-PRIMARY (confirmed on the firm's own site; publishable). VERIFIED-SECONDARY (best source is a credible third party; publishable with a visible flag). UNVERIFIED (never rendered). CONFLICT (sources disagree; never rendered until resolved). When in doubt, the humbler claim always ships.
An automated agent sweeps every firm's own channels — its site, help center, status pages — daily, and detects anything that changed since we last verified it. A confirmed change from a firm's own source publishes instantly with source and date; judgment calls (like a health state) wait for human review. A value older than 45 days without re-verification is greyed as 'stale', and any user-reported discrepancy is top priority the same day.
We rank offers by cost per $1,000 of drawdown room — eval fee plus activation, divided by drawdown in thousands. Never by discount percentage. Only VERIFIED-PRIMARY prices in dollars qualify; firms in an amber or crisis state are auto-excluded.
Each firm carries a state — OK, Watch, Amber, or Crisis — based only on documented facts with a date and source, never opinions. Amber and Crisis remove a firm from the cost rankings. The Health page is warning-only: if a firm isn't listed, it has no active signal.
Each firm's grade (out of 100) is a formula, not an opinion — and every input that feeds it is shown on its page. It weighs true cost versus peers (30%), rule friction — trailing vs static drawdown, whether the daily loss fails your account, minimum days (25%), track record from years operating and published payouts (25%), and live health (20%). A firm in Amber or Crisis is grade-capped no matter how cheap it is. Change any underlying fact and the grade recomputes itself.
Every rule change is logged with its date in an append-only history: never edited, never deleted. If we correct one of our own errors, that correction is its own entry and also feeds our public corrections log. Time is the moat — the longer it runs, the harder it is to copy.
No scores for sale, no opinions, no 'best firm' editorial, no strategy content. Trust signals are documented facts with a date and source — nothing else. Affiliate status lives in a separate disclosure file and never touches a record: monetization never touches the data.