Method & ownership

How we compare, and how this site makes money.

Every comparison site says it is independent. Here is the specific, checkable version of that claim (including what we do not do), so you can decide how much weight to give the tables.

Who writes this

CheaperStack is written by Giovanni Rasulo, a digital marketing and fractional manager working with small and mid-sized companies and e-commerce businesses, with twelve years in digital marketing: advertising, SEO, analytics and funnels. The bias this site is written from is that of someone who has to justify software spend to a business owner, not someone selling the software.

Professional background: giovannirasulo.com.

How comparisons are built

1. Pricing pages and plan limits first. Every comparison starts from what vendors publish: plan names, prices, seats, allowances, trial terms. Where a vendor's page cannot be read directly, figures are cross-checked against several independent pricing trackers before they are used.
2. One scale for every tool. Monthly billing is the baseline. Annual-only, lifetime and credit pricing is converted to a monthly equivalent, and where it matters, to cost per published article, because a cheap subscription that leaves all the writing to you is not a cheap stack.
3. Documentation over marketing copy. Claims about what a tool does come from its documentation and plan pages, not from its homepage headline.
4. Hands-on use is labelled. When a page includes first-hand use of a tool (our own screenshots, our own results), it says so explicitly. Pages without that label are documented comparisons, and we do not describe them as tests.
5. Every “alternatives” page says who should not switch. If the honest answer is to keep paying for the tool you have, the page says that.

The pricing policy

• Every page shows when its prices were last checked.
• Prices are re-checked monthly, and whenever a vendor announces a plan change.
• We headline monthly billing and note annual discounts separately, rather than quoting the discounted figure as the price.
• Launch promotions and first-month discounts are labelled as such and never presented as the ongoing price.
• If you find a price out of date, tell us and it is corrected the same week.

How this site makes money

Affiliate commissions. When a link is an affiliate link, we may earn a commission if you sign up through it, at no additional cost to you. Full details are on the disclosure page.

What that does not buy:

• No paid placements. No position in a table, inclusion in a roundup or recommendation is for sale.
• No vendor review. No company sees a page before it is published.
• Free tools are listed wherever they are the right answer, including tools that pay us nothing.

The commercial incentive is real and worth naming: we earn more when you switch to a tool with an affiliate programme than when you do not. The checks against that are a method you can read, a rule that free and non-paying options are always listed, and pages that tell you when to stay put. Judge the site on whether it actually does that.

Corrections

Errors are fixed in place, with the updated date shown on the page. Material corrections (a wrong price, a wrong feature claim, a changed recommendation) are made promptly and the page date is updated.

Contact

Corrections, comparison requests and vendor queries: use the contact form.