How we research.
Trust dies from inflation, so here is exactly what our words mean. Articles are held to these levels — the "Tested" label appears only with receipts, and we'd rather admit a piece is desk research than borrow credibility it hasn't earned.
Level 1 — Source-verified (every article, minimum bar)
Every number, grant term and price traces to a primary page — official grant pages, vendor pricing pages, primary survey PDFs — fetched on the date shown in the article's "facts checked" line, quoted with that date, and listed in the Sources section. Grant claims cite gov.sg pages, never a vendor's paraphrase. If we couldn't verify something, the article says "check current pricing" instead of guessing.
Level 2 — Community-corroborated
Where we cite owner experiences (like vendor markups), we quote real, dated forum posts — and we check the authors, not just the words. Accounts that turn out to be vendors, marketers or fakes get discarded; our evidence review has already killed quotes on exactly those grounds. Owner reports are labelled as anecdotes, never dressed up as statistics.
Level 3 — Tested by us (the badge means receipts)
"Tested" appears only when we ran the thing and can show the artifact: a working workflow export, configuration walkthroughs, real run behaviour. Right now, no page carries the badge. Our templates are the first candidates: we authored the invoice chaser and validated it as an importable workflow — run it in your own n8n before trusting it with clients, exactly as its README says. Tool comparisons that haven't earned the badge say so plainly — the Make vs Zapier verdict, for example, is Level 1 work: pricing-page and documentation research with dated quotes, not a lab test. When a comparison graduates to Level 3, the article will say what we ran and for how long.
What we will not do
- Claim hands-on testing we can't evidence. (Practitioner means the founder runs his own automation stack — it does not mean he has run every tool we compare.)
- Publish statistics without their year, population and source.
- Let a commission, referral fee or vendor relationship touch a verdict — see how we make money, including the founder firewall.
- Leave stale facts wearing fresh dates: the "facts checked" line changes only when we actually re-verified.
Found an error anyway? hello@aiautomations.sg — corrections get noted in the article's changelog, not silently patched.