Methodology

Every Free Tier Report on this site records the same fields, measured the same way, on a stated date. This page describes what those fields are and what a reader should and should not infer from them.

The four fields every report carries

Hard limits. The numeric ceiling on the free plan: how many scans, exports, credits, files, seats or requests you get before something stops working. Read from the vendor's pricing page or product documentation, not from a review site.

Card requirement. Whether a payment method must be supplied before the free plan starts. This is recorded for one reason: it is the single most common surprise, and almost no review site states it.

How limits are verified

A limit is only recorded if the vendor publishes it. If a vendor describes a limit as fair use, dynamic or compute-based without a number, the report says exactly that rather than converting it into an estimate.

Where a limit is expressed per unit, the report states the unit. Snyk's Open Source quota counts manifest files, not repositories, and a report that omits that distinction is wrong by a factor of twenty on a monorepo.

What we do not do

We do not create accounts under false identities, we do not resell access, and we do not present a trial as a free plan. A free plan means a tier that does not expire.

We do not accept payment for a rating, a position in a list, or a favourable verdict. Where an affiliate link exists it is disclosed on the page carrying it, and it never changes what the page concludes.

How often limits are re-checked

Each report carries the date its limits were last verified, printed at the bottom of the page. The target is a 90-day re-check. When a vendor changes a limit without announcing it, the verification date is how you can tell how stale a page is.

If you find a limit that has changed and we have not caught it, tell us and the page is corrected with a note.