The CreatorAdvise research desk

CreatorAdvise is operated as a measurement project rather than an editorial one. The research desk is the name for the process that produces every figure on this site: the scheduled capture of provider pricing, the hourly reachability checks, the WHOIS lookups, and the scoring function that turns those into a number.

Nothing on this site is rated by opinion. A provider's score is computed from the components we have actually measured, and a provider with fewer than three measured components is shown as unrated rather than given a placeholder rating. The component breakdown behind every score is published on that provider's own page, so any number here can be checked rather than taken on trust.

We have placed no test orders. That means delivery speed, retention and refill reliability are unmeasured for every provider on this site, and they are excluded from scoring rather than estimated. Where a page would otherwise have to guess at one of them, it says so instead.

The full scoring method, including every component and the thresholds at which a score is withheld, is published on the methodology page. How we collect prices, and what our crawler does and does not do, is on the crawler page.