Methodology
How we evaluate AI tools
Last updated: October 9, 2026
Most "best AI tools" roundups get the boring, checkable facts wrong: they quote last year's price, recommend a product the vendor shut down, and describe a free plan that stopped being free in 2024. Fixing that is the entire job we set out to do.
So here is exactly what we verify, and — just as important — what we don't claim to do.
What we verify for every tool we cover
1. Pricing, against the vendor's own pricing page. Every price on this site carries the month we last checked it, in the form (verified Sep 2026). Where a vendor has raised prices, we say when and by how much. Where a price is quote-only, we say that instead of inventing a number. Every price we have on file is collected on one page:the AI tool pricing index.
2. Whether the tool still exists. We check that each product is live and still taking new customers, and we flag the ones that have been discontinued, renamed, or absorbed by an acquisition. A surprising amount of what ranks today recommends products that were shut down years ago — QuickBooks Self-Employed, LionDesk, and others. Catching that is one of the few genuine advantages a small site has.
3. What the free tier actually includes. "Free plan" is the most misleading phrase in software marketing. We read the vendor's own limits — client caps, feature paywalls, trial lengths — and state them plainly, because the gap between "free" and "usable for free" is usually the whole decision.
4. Documented capabilities, from the vendor's documentation. Feature descriptions come from what the vendor publishes: help docs, changelogs, product pages. When a vendor markets something as "AI" that is really a rule-based automation, we say so.
5. Claims that contradict other public sources. Where a vendor's marketing conflicts with their own documentation, their pricing page, or recent reporting, we note the discrepancy rather than repeating the marketing line.
What we don't claim to do
We don't claim to have used every tool we write about. Where we have used a tool, we say so specifically — what we did with it, and what we saw — and we don't dress up reading documentation as hands-on experience.
This matters because the alternative is common and corrosive. Plenty of sites describe elaborate testing routines they never ran, on a page with no screenshots, no data, and no author who could have run them. You can't verify a claim like "we found invoices get paid faster" from the outside — which is exactly why it gets made so freely.
We would rather be the site whose checkable claims are all true than the site whose unverifiable claims sound impressive.
How our scores work
Each tool card shows a score out of 5. That score is a judgement about how well the tool fits the profession in question, based on the verified inputs above: entry price, what the free tier really allows, how much of the job the documented feature set covers, and how painful the upgrade path looks. It is not a measurement of a hands-on trial, and we don't present it as one.
Where a score is likely to move — a vendor in the middle of a repricing, a product that just changed hands — we say so next to the score.
Corrections
Prices and products change constantly, and we will get something wrong eventually. If you spot an error — a stale price, a tool we've marked as active that isn't, a limit we've described incorrectly — email [email protected] and we will fix it and update the date on the page. Corrections are logged in the article's revision date.
Independence
Some links on Fueee are affiliate links. Commission never determines whether a tool appears, what score it gets, or what we say about it — see ouraffiliate disclosure for the full statement. When a free tool is the better answer, we say so, even when a paid one pays us.
Read more about who runs this site on the about page.