Unbought
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How we score

We score what works. Every score on Unbought comes from real, first-hand user sentiment — what actual users report after putting a tool to work. Not press releases, not paid placements, not our opinions. One number, and it can't be bought.

One number, the Unbought Score

Every scored tool gets one number from 0 to 100 — its Unbought Score. It's built only from verified first-hand user experience and adjusted for how much real evidence stands behind it, so a tool with a handful of glowing mentions can't leapfrog one proven across hundreds of real reads. When there isn't enough signal to score a tool honestly, we don't guess — it shows AWAITING DATA instead of a number.

The 6-layer pipeline

We call it Community Intelligence, and it runs in six separate, auditable layers. Every layer is measured against human-labeled validation sets before it ships.

  1. Verbatim capture. Every review is captured word-for-word and never edited. The raw record is immutable.
  2. Normalization. Captured text is cleaned and standardized the same way every time, so the same input always produces the same result.
  3. Attribution. A 12-signal engine binds each comment to the specific tool it's actually about — no guessing, no lumping similar tools together.
  4. First-hand verification. Each comment is independently checked against one standard: did this person actually use the tool themselves? Recommendations, hearsay, and marketing noise are thrown out before anything is scored.
  5. Human-anchored QA. Results are checked against labeled gold-standard sets graded by people, so the machine's judgment stays honest.
  6. Sentiment and score. Only the verified first-hand experiences are read for sentiment and aggregated into the final Unbought Score.

More real reviews means higher confidence, which we show as a confidence band alongside the score.

Verdicts

WORKED (75 and up) · MIXED (50–74) · FAILED (below 50). The verdict is the score, translated — never edited by hand.

The rules we don't break

Zero affiliate links. Zero sponsored placements. Zero pay-to-influence rankings. Collections are curated by humans, but the ORDER inside every list always comes from the scores — never from us, never from a sponsor. User quotes appear verbatim or not at all. Corpus-level totals (like the counts on our homepage) are shown live from the database; we don't decorate individual tools with raw counts.