How we check and rate

Prices: read at the provider, with a date

Every price on AISafeCheck comes from the provider’s own pricing page. We note the plan name exactly as the provider writes it, the amount, the currency and the billing period, and we keep a saved copy of the page as evidence of what it said that day.

We read every price again each week, and no price on the site is older than fourteen days. The date next to a price tells you when we last read it.

A price appears in the currency the provider showed us. Where two services bill in different currencies, a separate line converts both at the European Central Bank rate and names the date of that rate, so you can compare them without doing the sums yourself.

Many security and privacy services charge less for the first term. Where the provider states what a plan renews at, we show that price as well, because it is the one you keep paying.

What the rating weighs

The score out of five is an editorial judgement, not a lab result. It weighs four things, roughly in this order:

• Protection against the risks this site covers: scam and phishing messages, cloned voices, chats that are kept or used for training, and personal data held by brokers.
• The provider’s own privacy: what it collects, whether it trains on your data, where it stores it, and how plainly it says so.
• Price after the first term: the renewal price counts for more than the intro offer.
• Ease: how quickly someone who is not technical can set it up and keep it running.

We build the rating from what the provider publishes: its documentation, its privacy policy and its pricing page. Where a provider leaves a question open, such as where chats are stored, we say that it is not stated rather than guess.

Reading, not testing

AISafeCheck reads and compares. We do not install products in a lab, send test phishing mails or measure detection rates, so we never present a rating as a test result. When a statement about protection comes from the provider itself, we present it as the provider’s claim.

How the order is set

Category pages list services by their editorial rating. On the homepage ranking, a service with a commission link can come first when two ratings are within a fraction of a point of each other. A clearly better rating always stays on top.

How we earn money

Some buttons use a partner link. If you buy after clicking one, the provider may pay us a commission; your price does not change. Where we earn from a click, it says so under the button. We name free tools and free settings, such as switching off chat training, whenever they are enough.

When something changes

Prices, plans and privacy terms change. When the weekly check finds a difference, we update the page and its date. The disclaimer sets out what that means for what you read here.