Terms

Using the directory

Reading it needs no account and no permission. The entries are written by hand and every checked fact carries the date it was checked, which is the only claim this site makes about accuracy: a dated fact is a record, an undated one is an assertion. A price with no date cannot be saved here at all.

That does not make the entries right. Software changes faster than anybody re-checks it, so treat a date as “this was true then”, follow the link to the vendor, and tell us when something has moved on: every listing ends with “Send a correction”, and every price has a link of its own.

Accounts

• One person, one account. The name on it appears beside anything you contribute, so it should be a name you are willing to be read under.
• A new account can review, vote, save listings and apply for a claim. Editing a listing needs an approved claim on that listing; inviting a contributor onto it needs to be its builder. Those distinctions are enforced on the server, not by hiding buttons.
• Keep the password to yourself. If you lose it, ask for a reset — using the link signs out every device, which is deliberate.
• We can disable an account for the reasons in “Removing things” below. A disabled account cannot be reset back into.

Reviews

Review a tool if you have used it or seriously evaluated it. One review per person per listing; submitting again replaces yours. Say what happened rather than how you feel about the company.

🛑 What we will not do to your review

These are the constraints that make the ratings worth anything, and they are in the permission matrix rather than in this paragraph:

• A vendor cannot hide, edit or delete a review of its own listing. It can answer in public and nothing else. Hiding one is an admin action, and the only reasons for it are in the next section.
• Nobody can edit your words — not a vendor, not an admin. An admin can hide a review; the text is never rewritten. If you edit your own, the page says it was edited.
• Placement is not for sale. Advertising here is labelled text in fixed slots. It does not change which listings appear, their order, or their scores. An advertiser cannot buy a listing’s discount block either — that belongs to whoever owns the listing and is labelled as theirs.
• Your email address is not given to a vendor unless you tick a box for it, and then only for the purpose you ticked. See Privacy.

Replying, and the limits on it

A review can become a public conversation between exactly two people: whoever wrote it and whoever maintains the listing. Nobody else can join — that is what makes it safe to leave open on a site with no moderation team. Three rules apply, all enforced:

• Neither side can post twice in a row. There is nothing to win by getting the last word, and neither party can bury the other’s answer.
• 20 messages, then it closes. Past that it informs no reader, and the two of you have email.
• You can withdraw your own message, and only your own. The page then says it was withdrawn rather than removing it silently — a gap in a conversation reads as tampering.

Submitting a tool

Anybody can suggest one. It goes into a queue a person reads, and a submission is not a promise that it will be listed. Entries are written by hand, so expect days rather than minutes, and nothing is emailed to you because nobody has committed to writing back.

A submitted link is not published by submitting it. It goes to the queue, not to a page, so the form cannot be used to place a link here. When an entry does get written, its outbound links carry rel="noopener nofollow", and a paid placement adds sponsored — being listed is never a link you bought.

What you post, and who owns it

Your words stay yours. By posting a review, a reply, a listing update or a job advert you give us permission to publish it here and to quote it — with attribution to the name on your account — in the newsletter and in material about the directory. Nothing exclusive, nothing that stops you posting it elsewhere, and nothing that lets us sell it on.

Post only what is yours to post. Vendor logos are shown under the ordinary practice of identifying a product by its mark; if you own one and would rather it were not here, write to us and it comes off.

Removing things

A review, a message, a public profile or an account can be removed for:

• Someone else’s personal information appearing in it
• A review of a product the writer has plainly never used
• Multiple accounts by one person, or reviews solicited in exchange for anything
• Spam, and abuse aimed at a person rather than at a product
• A legal demand we have no grounds to refuse

A hidden review still exists and its author still sees it in their own list — it does not vanish without explanation. Removal is deliberately narrow: a bad review of a product is not a reason, and a vendor asking is not a reason.

To point one out, use “Report” beside a review or a message, or at the foot of a profile. A person reads every report and decides; no number of reports hides anything by itself, and nobody is emailed about one, including whoever wrote what was reported. “Other” is for what the list does not name: it asks for a look, and nothing comes down except for a reason above.

Advertising

Placements are bought for a fixed period at published prices. An admin reviews one before it can run, and it goes up when it is paid for — the term starts there. They are labelled, text-only, and run no code on this site.

Whoever writes a placement never approves it. An admin can approve, reject or delete one and cannot write or rewrite an advertiser’s words — so copy that has to change is sent back rather than quietly edited, and no account can put up its own advert unreviewed.

Reporting is two integers a day per placement: times shown, times clicked. There is no audience data to report because none is collected.

Billing and refunds

Advertising is the only thing here that costs money. Accounts, listings, reviews, votes, job adverts and submissions are free and always have been, so on those there is nothing to bill and nothing to refund.

A placement is booked on one of two billing periods, in US dollars: monthly or yearly. It renews automatically at the same price until you cancel it. The price is written onto your booking when you place it, so a later change to this card does not alter what you are charged for a placement already running.

Cancelling is one button on your own placement, any time, with nothing to ask us for. What happens then is the whole rule: the placement runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, is not charged again, and that period is not refunded. Nothing is prorated and there is no notice to give.

If a renewal payment fails — an expired card, usually — the placement is not pulled off the site that day. It keeps running for the rest of the period you already paid for while the payment is retried, and stops on its own if nothing succeeds. You are not billed for a period that never started.

Every figure is the price of one period, charged again each period until you cancel. Nothing is added at the end, and the same card is on the advertising page, where a placement is actually booked.

Payment is taken by Waffo, not by this site. Card payments go through Waffo Pancake, which acts as the merchant of record for the sale. In practical terms: you are sent to a checkout page hosted by Waffo, no card or bank details ever reach this site or are stored here, Waffo appears as the seller on your statement, and Waffo determines and remits any sales tax or VAT — so tax may be added on top of the rate-card price at checkout, depending on where you are.

What comes back here is a signed confirmation that the placement was paid for. A placement can also still be invoiced and settled by arrangement, if you would rather not pay by card — Privacy sets out exactly what is passed to Waffo and what is kept here.

The term starts when the placement goes up, which is when it is paid for — not when it is booked, and not when it is approved. One waiting for review, and one approved but not yet paid for, have both used none of their days. From there:

• Before it goes up — cancel for a full refund. Nothing has run.
• We reject it — full refund. A rejected placement never appears on the site.
• It does not run for part of its term because of something at our end — we take it down, or the site is unavailable for a long stretch — the whole days it did not run are refunded.
• You cancel — the placement runs to the end of the period you have paid for and is not billed again. That period is not refunded, because you get the placement for all of it. This is the one row that is not a refund.

Ask by email and name the placement. Refunds are agreed within 14 days of being asked for. A card payment is refunded through Waffo, back to the method you paid with — including the tax it collected. How long it then takes to appear is your bank’s business, not ours.

Job adverts

A listing’s owner may post roles at that company. A salary figure in US dollars is required — an advert without one is not published, because a board nobody can filter is not a board. One figure is what the employer stated; the other is derived and marked ≈.

Adverts come off the board three months after publication or renewal, whichever is later. An expired advert keeps its page as a record but the Apply section is withheld entirely: a covering letter sent into a role that was filled in spring is answered by silence, and the applicant is the only party who ever finds out.

Applications sent through this site go to that listing’s owner. We are not the employer, take no part in hiring, and make no claim about whether the role exists.

What this site does not promise

• That it is up. One server, one operator, no redundancy and no support rota. It goes down sometimes.
• That an entry is current. Every checked fact carries its date so you can judge that yourself.
• That your data survives. Backups are the hosting platform’s and are not tested. Keep your own copy of anything you would miss.
• Anything about the tools listed. They are other people’s products. What you do with them, and what they do with your data, is between you and them.

🛑 Disclaimers and the limit on liability

The four above are the specific version of what this section says formally. This site is provided as it is and as it happens to be available. No warranty is given, of any kind, express or implied — in particular none that it is accurate, current, complete, uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or fit for whatever you intend to do with it.

That is not a formality here. The entries are compiled by hand from vendors’ own material; a checked fact carries the date it was checked and nothing more is claimed for it. Decisions about money — what to buy, what to migrate, what to cancel — should be checked against the vendor, not against this site. Ratings and reviews are readers’ opinions, published as theirs. Job adverts and listings describe other people’s businesses.

What we are not liable for

• Loss you suffer by relying on something here that turned out to be wrong, out of date, or missing.
• Anything a listed tool, an advertiser, an employer or another reader does — including anything that happens after you follow a link away from here.
• The site being down, slow, or losing what you posted. See the four promises above that are not made.
• Indirect loss of any kind — lost profit or revenue, wasted expenditure, lost or corrupted data, business interruption, or damage to reputation — whether or not it was foreseeable.

The cap, stated plainly

Where liability can lawfully be limited, it is limited to what you actually paid this site in the twelve months before the claim.

Advertising is the only thing here anybody pays for, so for a reader, a reviewer, an account holder, a listing owner or an employer posting a role, that figure is zero. It is written out rather than left as a formula because a cap you have to compute is a cap you were not told. For an advertiser it is what that placement cost — and the remedy for a placement that did not run is the refund set out under Billing and refunds, not damages.

⚠ What is not excluded, and cannot be

Nothing above limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law that applies to you does not permit to be excluded. If you deal with this site as a consumer, your statutory rights are untouched by any of this — a term in a document cannot take away a right given to you by legislation, and a clause pretending otherwise would be void and would still have misled you.

If some part of this section turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of it stands.

Changing these terms

This page lives in the source code and changes with the software. A change that alters what happens to something you already posted will be described rather than applied quietly — the review opt-ins were changed that way, and Privacy records what the earlier wording promised and how it is still honoured.

Getting in touch

[email protected] — read by one person, who also wrote everything above.

Written by the person who built the site, describing rules the code enforces. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and the section above about liability is the part where that matters most: it is written to be honest and readable rather than to be the widest exclusion somebody could draft. There is still no governing-law clause, because which law applies is a fact about where this is run from and not something a page should assert on its own. If the site ever takes money at a scale that makes these load-bearing, they want drafting properly rather than improvising.