Editorial policy

How tools are researched

Every fact on a tool page — what it does, its plans and prices, its free plan and its limits, the platforms it runs on — is taken from the vendor's own website: its pricing page, product pages, help centre or official announcements. Each page lists those sources at the foot, with the date each one was read.

Prices are shown in US dollars as the vendor published them. Where a vendor shows a monthly and an annual price, we show both. Where we could not confirm a price on the vendor's own pages, we say so and quote none. Vendors change prices often, so check theirs before you buy.

We do not publish star ratings or scores. We have no reviews to base them on, and a rating without reviews behind it would mislead you.

Sponsorship and rankings

The companies behind the tools can pay for a place on the site: a featured placement or a category sponsorship in the directory, a sponsored entry in a guide's list, or a whole guide. Every paid placement is disclosed where it appears: labelled Sponsored in the directory, and in a guide by a note above the list.

In the directory, sponsored tools sit in their own slot, apart from the category's list, which keeps its order. In a guide that lists tools, a sponsor can take the top place. The page carries a disclosure before the list starts, and every link to the sponsor's website is marked rel="sponsored", which tells search engines the link is paid. A sponsored tool has to meet the same bar to be listed as the others, and its facts come from its own website, like every other tool's. Every other entry is ranked by the method the guide states.

A guide a company paid us to publish says so in the note at its foot, which names the company and who wrote the guide, and every link in it to another website is marked rel="sponsored".

A company can also list its own tool, for a basic listing fee of $9.99 that is refunded in full if we do not approve it. The fee pays for an editor's review, never for an approval, and a company's listing always says that its facts were supplied by the company and checked by us.

Where a page contains an affiliate link, or names a product made by a company connected to us, the page says so beside it.

Guides written by the companies that make the tools

Companies that make the tools can write guides for the people who use them. Those guides are marked with the company's name (From Zapier, say), carry it as the byline, and say that the company makes the tool. Every one is read by an editor before it is published, and checked against the company's own website. The company is responsible for what it says about its own product. How submissions are reviewed.

AI assistance and images

Some of our guides are drafted with AI assistance from our own research, and say so at the end, along with how each was checked before it was published: reviewed by our team, or checked automatically. The photographs on guides, articles and most category pages are AI-generated illustrations, each made from a written description of what the page is about; the caption says so where it appears. A handful of category pages instead use a real, freely licensed photograph, with the photographer credited in a caption under it. Tool logos in the directory are the vendors' own marks, shown only to identify their products.

News

The news page carries short stories about what changed in AI and automation tools. Software reads the companies' own announcements and the AI sections of a few tech news sites every few hours. When an item is news that people can use at work, AI writes a short story about it in our own words from the original's facts: what changed, who it is for, and how to try it at work. A story goes up without an editor reading it first, but only after automatic checks: the news is no more than a week old and dated, it is not the same story as one already on the page, every figure in the story appears in the original, no sentence is copied from it, and the original is credited and linked at the foot of the page. The story never claims we have used or tested the product. Its picture is AI-generated and is labelled as such. Posts from community sites such as Hacker News are read by an editor before they appear. Items from before September 2026 are short summaries whose headline links to the original. The original is the authority, and a story that gets it wrong is corrected as below.

Who writes it

Our guides and articles are written by Anu Verma, a tech and automation enthusiast who writes about AI tools and automation for people who are not engineers. The authors page also covers the guides written by the companies that make the tools, and the about page says who publishes the site and why.

Corrections

If a price, a plan or a fact is out of date or wrong, email hello@automatebasics.com with the page and what has changed. We check it against the vendor's own pages, fix it, and update the date the facts were checked. We do not change a page because a vendor would prefer different wording; we change it when it is wrong.