Buyer's checklist
Twelve questions, in the order they save you the most money. Several of them are on every listing here; the rest take ten minutes on the vendor's own site.
| 1 | What is the word limit on the plan I am buying? Often stated only inside the app. A "unlimited" plan with a fair-use clause is a limit with better marketing. |
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| 2 | Is the price monthly or the annual rate shown monthly? Most vendors in this category display the annual-billing figure by default. Check before comparing two prices. |
| 3 | Does it keep my text, and for how long? Look in the privacy policy, not the FAQ. A stated retention period is a good sign; silence is not the same as no. |
| 4 | Is my text used to train anything? And if there is an opt-out, is it on my plan or only on the expensive one? |
| 5 | Can I delete what I submitted? A documented deletion route matters more than a promise on the home page. |
| 6 | Which detectors does the vendor name? Named detectors are a checkable claim. "Passes all AI detectors" is not. |
| 7 | When was that claim last true? Ask for a date. If there is no date, treat the claim as undated marketing, because it is. |
| 8 | Does the meaning survive? Run your own text, not their demo text, and read the output against the original. |
| 9 | What happens to numbers and names? Test a paragraph with figures in it. This is where these tools fail most expensively. |
| 10 | Is there an API, and what is the rate limit? A per-word price is meaningless without the throughput you can actually get. |
| 11 | What does cancelling look like? Self-serve in the account, or an email to support? Check before, not after. |
| 12 | Who is the company? A named legal entity with an address is not a guarantee of anything, but its absence tells you what recourse you have: none. |
The one that matters most
Question seven. Everything else on this list is a normal software purchase; the date is the thing specific to this market. A detector result without a date is not a weak claim, it is a claim about nothing - and it is the single most common thing sold in this category.