About toolweight
- Weighted comparisons of developer infrastructure, ranked on the things your project needs.
- Not the things a vendor wants measured.
- No money changes hands, because credibility is the only asset a comparison site has.
- Comparisons
- 12
- Tools tracked
- 156
- Money changing hands
- $0
- Written from
- Australia
Why it exists
- Search “best email sending API” and page one is affiliate content.
- The ordering is a payout table, not a ranking.
- The top tool’s “cons” are compliments in disguise.
- Most of it is disclosed in grey six-point type, and still worthless.
- The ordering you needed to trust is the exact thing that was sold.
Credibility is the moat
- A comparison site’s only asset is whether a senior engineer believes it.
- Expensive to build, trivial to destroy, impossible to buy back.
- So independence is the product, not a phase.
- No house tool, no partner tier, no mechanism to move a row for a cheque.
How that shows up in the build
| Principle | What it means |
|---|---|
| No affiliate links | Every outbound vendor link is plain. No tracking, no redirect hop, no commission. |
| No sponsored placement | Roster membership is an editorial call, argued in public issues. Nothing is paid in. |
| No advertising | So no reason to block AI crawlers. robots.txt welcomes them, because being cited is the distribution. |
| No accounts or email gate | Nothing to sign up for. Every page, the dataset and the API are open and ask nothing of you. |
| No tracking analytics | Nothing to sell, so no audience to sell. |
| Every value cited | Source URL, date and confidence on every cell, with the stale ones listed in public. |
What it costs, and who pays
- Nothing, and me.
- A static site built from a git repo: hosting is rounding error, research is time.
- No funding, no company, no revenue model in a drawer.
- If that changes it will be said here first, never ads or affiliate money.
- The dataset is CC BY 4.0, with a JSON API, an MCP server and a markdown twin of every page.
- Take the numbers, feed them to an agent, build something better.
- Attribution is the only condition.
Where it is written from
- Australia, so Sydney availability, AUD pricing and
.ausupport are first-class fields, not footnotes. - Which is why Australian SMS providers get their own category.
- An awkward market the vendor docs are evasive about, so someone should write the numbers down.
Getting it wrong
- This site will contain errors: prices move the week after they are verified.
- Some facts were read off an error message at eleven at night.
- The fix is not pretending otherwise, it is making every claim checkable.
- Read the methodology, check the source on any cell that matters, and if it is wrong, say so.
- Corrections come before new content, and vendors use the same public queue as everyone else.
How it works · Methodology · Sources & staleness · Attribution & licensing