TRANSPARENCY

How we work

Smart home buyers deserve to know exactly how a recommendation site operates. Here's ours, before you ask.

Profiles are research. Reviews are hands-on. We label both.

Most pages here are research profiles: compatibility facts compiled from manufacturer documentation, certification registries (Matter/CSA, Z-Wave Alliance, FCC filings), and published testing. Profiles carry no verdicts, no rankings, no stars — because we haven't held the product, and we won't pretend otherwise. A small set of products our founder has physically bought and tested will carry hands-on reviews, clearly badged, with the testing period, original photos, and his name on them. "Best of" rankings will only ever include tested products. Our build system mechanically blocks review language on research pages — honesty here is enforced by software, not policy.

Every fact has a source and a date

Our database records where each claim came from and when it was last verified — you'll see the date on every page. Records go stale; we re-verify on a schedule, and we track products through their whole lifecycle, including the end: discontinued and bricked products stay in the library with warnings, so nobody buys a dead platform secondhand. (Ask our checker about the Sutro pool monitor.)

AI-assisted, human-owned

We use AI agents to compile research, maintain the database, and draft pages. Every page is published under human ownership and accountability; hands-on claims are only ever made by the human who did the testing; and AI is never used to fake experience. The honest advantage: AI lets us maintain more accurate, fresher data than a team many times our size — which is the entire point of this site.

How we make money

Today: we don't — we currently have no affiliate relationships and no ads. The plan: affiliate commissions when you buy through links on our pages (always disclosed, on every page that has them), and licensing our compatibility dataset to businesses and AI platforms. Two promises that will outlive the beta: commissions never change a compatibility fact, and we cover products that pay us nothing on exactly the same terms as products that will.

The mission

"Complexity is inevitable, confusion is not." Home automation's complexity — five ecosystems, five protocols, thousands of devices — is a given. Our job is making sure the confusion isn't: everything we build must make a smart home simpler to choose, simpler to set up, and lower-maintenance to live with. When we fail that test, tell us.