What we mean by free.
Free should mean you can finish the job and keep what you made. Advanced extras can cost money. Getting your own work out shouldn't.
Published so anyone — a user, or a company we marked yellow — can hold us to it. Every dot links here.
The one question we ask
Can I finish the job, and keep what I made?
Everything below follows from that.
Green: you get everything you need
Yes to both halves of the question. It may want an account, or cap you at a number a day — those are fine, and the word beside the dot says which: account 5 a day. A cap on how much is not the same as a hole in what you get.
Yellow: something's missing
Two real cases. You can't keep what you made (watermark no export), or you only got part of the tool (features locked personal only). Also ads — you pay in attention.
Red: it costs money
paywall card needed trial only. A free trial and a card "just for verification" both live here. A paid product with a sample is a paid product, and there is no version of a card up front that is anything but red.
Grey dash: nothing to judge
An article, a review, a listicle. It isn't offering anything, so a colour would be a lie. Declining to give a verdict is the honest answer.
Blue question mark: we haven't looked yet
We would rather say "we don't know" than guess. Tap it, we check it, we email you the answer.
The parts we don't hide
We judge from the United States.
Prices, free tiers and availability differ by country. We check from one place, so a site that is free where you are may still show up red here, or the other way round. We would rather say this than pretend we can see everywhere.
A cap can quietly become a wall, and we can't always tell.
"Three a day" is a cap. "One a day" is a block dressed as a cap. The test we apply: is the free allowance enough for one realistic, complete piece of work? That call is a judgement, and it is the one we are most likely to get wrong.
Sites change, and our answer ages.
A green from two months ago is not a promise about today. We re-check on a schedule, and a verdict has an age. When a site we watch starts charging, members hear about it.
We judge the offer, never the company.
A company is allowed to charge. Most should. Red is not an accusation — it is a fact about a price. We say what a page does, not whether the people behind it are good.
We judge ourselves by the same rule, and we lose.
reallyfree.app is yellow, word limits. Our own free use is capped, so we are not green. A test in our build fails if we ever paint ourselves green. If our own standard can't be used against us, it isn't a standard.
A dot is never for sale.
Not the colour, not the position, not removal of a yellow or a red, and not a faster path to green. If a company wants to go green, the advice is free and we give it to everyone who asks, customer or not.
We got this wrong
Sometimes we will. A site changed, a cap moved, we read a page badly, or you're in a country we can't see. Email us and a person will look at it.
Send: the link, the dot we showed, and what you actually saw. That's enough. No form, no account, no ticket number.
If we were wrong, we fix the record and the correction goes out to everyone. If we were right, we'll tell you why, in plain words.
Who pays for this
Nobody we judge. The dots are free and always will be. The people who join the collective pay for it, and 5% of what they pay goes to a children's technology-access charity.
Join the collective — $9.95 a year