Paid placement policy

Two one-off things are offered on this site — nothing can be bought until the terms of sale publish: the terms of sale will be published on this site first, and this page will say so on the day that changes. Until then this page is the policy, not an order form.

Everything below is consistent with section 3 and section 6 of the inclusion criteria, which are the rules this page cannot weaken.

What can be bought, and what each thing does

What no payment can do

• No fee is required to be assessed or listed. No product is in this index because it paid, and none is left out because it did not.
• No payment can prevent, alter or remove an assessment, change a verdict, change what a record says, or change where a product appears in the comparison table or in any listing order.
• No payment buys a correction or a re-assessment. The correction path on every record is open to everyone, free, and a re-assessment on new public evidence is free, as assessment always is.
• There are no paid rows in the comparison table, and there is no arrangement — affiliate, referral, commission or otherwise — behind any link on this site.
• There are no user reviews and no star ratings on this site, paid or unpaid. Every assessment here is first-hand work with its sources linked.
• Payment does not soften a finding. An unflattering assessment is published as found.

Expedited assessment — £49 one-off, prices exclude VAT

Buys queue position only. The assessment result is unaffected and is published in full whatever it says, including if it is unflattering.

What it does, mechanically. The product moves to the front of the queue of products not yet published. Each unexpedited request that was ahead of it moves one place back; requests behind it are unaffected. Nothing else moves: not eligibility, not whether the product is listed at all, not what the record says, not the product's position in the comparison table or in any listing order, and not the verdict.

When it is offered. Expedited assessment is offered only while there is more room in the index than there are products waiting for it — while the number of free slots (40 less the number of records in the comparison table) is greater than the number of products in the queue. Whenever free slots are fewer than or equal to the queue length, no expedited fee is offered and none is accepted; that includes the index being full at 40 records, where there are no free slots at all.

The reason is one line: past that point queue position would decide whether a product is published and not only when, and a fee that decided that would be a fee for presence in the index. That is not for sale at any price.

If it turns out it could not be offered. Any expedited fee already paid for an assessment that cannot be published on the terms above — the room in the index having closed before the record could publish — is refunded in full. That is a fee for something this site could not deliver, and it goes back.

If the assessment finds the product fails a criterion. That is not the case above, and it is treated differently. The assessment is published as a refusal, naming the rule it fails and the public evidence that decided it, exactly as any other assessment would be — and the fee is not refunded. The fee bought queue position for an assessment that was then performed and published in full, which is what it says it buys. A fee that came back only when the finding was unwelcome would tie payment to outcome, and this index does not tie payment to outcome in either direction. A refused product can be assessed again on new public evidence, free, and the criteria page says what evidence would settle the rule it failed.

Verified vendor block — £99 one-off, prices exclude VAT

A section of the vendor's own words on the vendor's own record: their positioning, their roadmap, their migration notes, their support commitments.

What "Verified" means here, because the word is doing one narrow job: the buyer is verified as the vendor of the listed product — only the vendor a record is about can buy the block on that record. It does not mean this index verified the block's content, which is published unedited and marked as the vendor's own words.

The terms of it are these.

• It is labelled, inside the block, at the top. The first line inside the box reads:

  Vendor-authored · paid feature · published <date> · unedited

  with the block's own publication date in place of the placeholder. The wording is fixed and is not negotiable, and the label is never moved to a footnote, a caption below the block, or a line outside the box.

• It sits after the independent assessment, always. On the record page it renders after the verdict, after the freshness stamp, after the attribute matrix and after the written assessment. A reader meets what this index found before they meet what the vendor paid to say.
• It is published unedited. The vendor's words are theirs: this index does not rewrite them, tone them down, shorten them or add to them. The narrow limits — content that is unlawful, and content that presents itself as part of the independent assessment — will be stated in the terms of sale, before anything can be bought.
• It carries no vendor styling. The block is boxed, tinted and ruled so that it cannot be mistaken for the assessment. No supplied CSS, no brand fill, no borderless variant, no version that blends into the page. Outbound links inside the block carry the machine-readable rel="sponsored" attribute.
• Buying it changes nothing outside the box. No attribute value, no verdict, no matrix cell, no position in the table or in any listing order, and no freshness stamp changes because a vendor bought a block. The record of a vendor with a block and the record of a vendor without one differ in exactly one respect: the presence of that one boxed section after the assessment.
• It includes 12 months of factual updates to the block, made on request at reasonable effort, running from the date of purchase rather than from the date the block is published. The precise definition of that term arrives with the terms of sale, before anything can be bought.

The sponsored band

There are no sponsored placements on this site and none are sold today. If measured traffic ever justified them, they would be sold as a clearly labelled band outside the comparison table — never rows inside it, holding no position in any listing order — and the inclusion criteria page would list them as a third purchasable thing, with the label they carry, before any were sold. The label, if that day comes, is fixed too, and reads:

Advertisement — paid placement · does not affect ranking or assessment

How these are sold

Both products are offered business-to-business only; checkout, when it opens, will ask for business details — company name, business email, and a VAT number where the buyer has one — and the products are offered to businesses for business purposes. All prices on this site exclude VAT.

Questions

Ask before buying, and ask anything about this policy, at hello@evalindex.dev. The related pages are the inclusion criteria, which decide what is listed, and the disclosure page, which says who writes and decides what.

This page was first published on 23 August 2026.