How we verify facts and reviews

Facts

Each fact, such as “Free plan: Yes”, stores the page it came from and a short quote from that page. Our checker, AppBreakupBot/1.0 (+https://appbreakup.com/verification), fetches the page and looks for that exact quote.

• Verified: the quote was on the source page at the date shown.
• Source changed: the quote is gone. The fact may be out of date, and it appears in change alerts until an editor re-checks it.
• Not yet verified: we haven't confirmed it against the source, often because the site blocks automated checks.

The checker respects robots.txt (if a site's robots.txt can't be loaded, it assumes it may not crawl), waits at least a second between requests to the same site, and only reads the specific pages our facts cite. For open-source licence facts it reads GitHub's official API instead of scraping repository pages. It never logs in or gets around blocks.

For site owners

To stop the checker reading your site, add User-agent: AppBreakupBot followed by Disallow: / to your robots.txt. Facts we can no longer check will show as “Not yet verified”. To correct or remove a listing, use the corrections form or email [email protected].

Reviews

Every review is read by a person before it appears. An editor labels each one with the strongest proof they could check. These labels are an editor's judgment, not automated confirmations:

• Not verified: We couldn't check anything beyond the review itself.
• Work email on file: The reviewer gave an email address on a company domain that an editor judged plausible. We don't confirm they own it.
• Public profile checked: An editor looked at a public profile the reviewer linked (for example GitHub) and found it consistent with using the app.
• Screenshot checked: An editor saw a screenshot of the reviewer's account in the app.
• Receipt checked: An editor saw a receipt or invoice showing the reviewer paid for the app. This is the only tier that checks a purchase.

Reviews are shown strongest proof first, then newest first. In rankings, a review counts more the stronger its proof (unverified reviews count half). Only the “Receipt checked” label means we saw evidence of a purchase.

We reject reviews that are fake, written by the app's own staff without disclosure, or copied from elsewhere. We never edit a review to change its meaning, and we never hide a review for being negative. Every approval and rejection is recorded in the public moderation log.

Reviews where the writer received something in return are labelled “Incentivized” and don't count toward rankings.