How we test
Every verdict on Skuto comes from one place: the vendor's own published terms, prices and documentation. We check those sources on a schedule, link them on the page, and show you the date we last looked. No opinion dressed up as fact. If we can't point to a source, we don't publish a verdict.
The verdict system
Every check ends in one of three verdicts. Each is a color, a shape and a word, always all three together, never just the color.
Why not color alone? About 8% of men (and roughly 0.5% of women) are red-green colorblind. To them, a red dot and a green dot look nearly the same. So every verdict also carries a distinct shape (circle, triangle, octagon) and the word itself. Print the page in black and white and the verdicts still work.
Where the facts come from
Four kinds of sources, all public:
- Vendor pricing pages: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Perplexity and the rest.
- Data-use and privacy terms: the documents that say what happens to what you type.
- Usage-limit documentation: message caps, context windows, what "unlimited" actually means.
- Regulator news from the EDPB (the board of Europe's data-protection authorities) and the national watchdogs it coordinates.
The rule is simple: no source, no verdict. Every verdict on a tool page links to the documents it came from, with the date we read them. Click through and check us any time.
How often we check
An automated scan re-reads every source our tools depend on, once a week. Here's what that means in practice:
- Nothing changed → we touch nothing. We don't bump dates to look fresh. The "Last verified" date only moves when we actually verified something.
- Something changed → the data gets updated. The facts behind the tool change, the "Last verified" date moves, and you see both on the tool page.
If the scan breaks, we get alerted. A silent failure would mean stale verdicts, and a stale verdict is worse than no verdict.
What we don't do
- No legal advice. Skuto gives educational information. It says so at the bottom of every page, and we mean it.
- No interpreting your health, tax or legal situation. We give you questions to ask, checklists and drafts, never "here's what your case means."
- We say when we're not sure. AI detectors and AI answers can both be wrong. Where a tool relies on one, we show our confidence level in plain words.
- Reviewed pages name their reviewer. Where a page needs a professional eye (privacy topics especially), the reviewer is named on that page.
Who checks
Francesco Romanello
Founder — builds and verifies every tool
Skuto is one person reading the sources, not a law firm. Francesco builds every tool and checks every fact against the documents above. When a topic needs more than a careful reader, he says so and brings one in.
More about Francesco and Skuto →