How The Auteur Rating works
We don't aggregate anonymous reviews. We use the service and grade it — every claim below is checkable.
What a rating is
Most review sites collect opinions from strangers and average them. We do the opposite: we use the service ourselves, score it against a fixed rubric, and publish a letter grade with our name on it. There is no submission form on this site, because there is nothing for anyone else to submit.
A grade is three letters in a fixed order — Craft, then Cost, then Care. AAA means all three axes earned an A. ABA means Cost came in at B. We never average the three into one number: the whole reason to publish letters instead of stars is that the detail survives.
The three axes
These are the three places a founder actually gets burned. The feature does not do what the page said. The invoice is not the number you agreed to. Something breaks and nobody answers.
Craft
Does it actually do the core job?
- The core feature, used for real — not a demo account
- Reliability and availability over the period we used it
- Marketing promise versus what the product does
- Whether it works for cross-border and non-resident founders
Cost
Is the money structure honest and predictable?
- Whether pricing is published at all — no call-us wall
- Hidden fees, forced bundles, and surprise line items
- How hard it is to downgrade or cancel
- Whether an early founder can start without an enterprise conversation
Care
Does it treat a small customer like a person?
- Support response, measured — we file at least one real ticket as an ordinary customer
- Documentation and onboarding quality
- How it treats you on the way out: account closure, data export
- Whether policy changes are announced or discovered
One deliberate limit on Cost: we do not quote anyone's prices. Published figures change faster than we can re-verify them, and a stale number is worse than none. What we grade is whether the money structure is legible and predictable before you commit — not whether it is cheap.
What the letters mean
| Letter | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A | Exemplary — we recommend without caveats on this axis. |
| B | Solid — does the job, with limitations we spell out. |
| C | Reserved — real trade-offs you should understand first. |
Why there is no D or F
Because being listed is already the filter. We only grade services that made it onto The Founder Stack, and a service we would give an F was never going on the shelf in the first place. Listing is the pass/fail; the grade is the nuance.
When a service we already graded deteriorates badly, we do not slide it down to a D. We withdraw the rating, say so on the page, and remove the card. The review URL stays up — badges we handed out are still on other people's sites, and an honest withdrawal notice is better than a dead link.
Every grade carries its own exit condition
Under each letter you will find a line beginning “What would change this grade” — the specific thing that would move it down. This is not decoration. It forces an A to read as a conditional judgement rather than applause, and it commits us in advance to what we have to look at when we come back.
Re-verification
Every rating carries the date it was made and the date it is due for review — six months out, folded into our quarterly freshness sweep. Each review page shows its full rating history, so you can see whether a grade has held or moved and why. A reference nobody maintains erodes trust instead of building it, which is why the date is on the badge as well as the page.
Grades are not for sale
Grades are not for sale. Getting listed buys a look at a card — never a grade, never a better one, never a softer sentence. Partnerships and affiliate links carry no weight in the rubric, and every relationship we have is disclosed on the review itself.
Two things follow from that. We never grade our own services — Auteur's Canadian virtual office will never carry a rating, because grading yourself is not a review. And where we do have a commercial relationship, the disclosure sits directly under the grade, next to the rubric that produced it, rather than in a footer nobody reads.
Badge terms of use
Services we have graded are welcome to display their badge. The conditions are short:
- Only the service that received the grade may display it.
- Use the snippet as provided — the grade and the as-of date are part of the image and must not be edited, recreated, or overlaid.
- Keep the link back to the review page intact.
- The badge is served from our domain, so a re-verified grade updates itself wherever it is embedded. Do not self-host a copy.
- If a rating is withdrawn, the right to display the badge ends with it.