A free score is the correct first stop and there is no version of this page that pretends otherwise. On 2026-09-19 their site published no price at all — no pricing page, no figure anywhere on the home page. The useful question is therefore not which tool is better; it is the one nobody selling software asks you: at what point does paying for this buy you anything? Below is where a free score settles it, and where it structurally cannot.
Where free is enough, and where it is not
| Your situation | Is a free score enough? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You want a sanity check on a thought you had this morning | Yes | Nothing is at stake yet, and a free score costs a minute |
| You are comparing ten half-formed ideas to see which survive a first look | Yes | Paying per idea at this stage buys precision you cannot use |
| You are about to spend a month of evenings on one of them | No | A number with no stated rejection rule cannot be argued with, and you need to be able to argue |
| The answer has to hold for your constraints, not in general | No | Time, budget, whether you will take calls — a general score does not know any of it |
| You need to know where the claim came from | No | A score is a summary; a source is a link somebody can open |
A judgement, published so the rows can be argued with individually. 2 of the 5 say do not pay anyone, including us — which is the test of whether a page like this is worth reading.
The line between the two halves is not quality. It is whether a decision with a cost attached is about to be made. Below that line, precision is waste: you are still generating options and a fast, free read is the right instrument. Above it, three specific things start to matter, and none of them is a bigger number.
The three things a score cannot do
It cannot be wrong in a specific way. A number has no parts, so there is nothing in it to contest. Ours publishes the list instead: 10 checks on a sourced candidate and 12 on an idea you bring, each of which can fail on its own and each of which is named in the result. You can tell us a specific check was misapplied; a bare number has no part you can point at, so the only available disagreement is with the whole thing.
It cannot know your constraints. The same idea is a good business for a funded team and an impossible one for somebody with six hours a week, and a general score has to pick one of those readings silently. On our own benchmark of 8 cases the two founder profiles disagree outright on some of them — same sentence in, opposite verdict out — which is the clearest evidence we have that a founder-blind number is answering a different question from the one you asked.
It cannot show you its misses. We publish ours: of 5 documented flops the solo profile rejected 4, and it also rejected 1 documented success. That last figure is the one that tells you which way the instrument leans, and it is exactly the figure a tool with no published record cannot give you at any price.
How to read a free score without being fooled by it
Three habits, and they cost nothing.
- Run the same idea twice, worded differently. Not to catch the tool out — to see how much of the number is coming from your phrasing rather than from the idea. If a rewrite moves it more than a point or two, you are reading a summary of your own pitch.
- Ignore the number and read the reasons. Whatever a tool gives you underneath the score is the part with information in it. If there is nothing underneath, that is the finding.
- Write down what would have to be true for the score to be wrong. Then go and check the cheapest of those things yourself. This is the entire method, and it works with any tool or none.
What paying actually buys
Concretely, so it is checkable rather than atmospheric: a decision that commits, a named check behind it, a link under the evidence where one exists, and a first move with a stopping condition. Our first 2 credits are granted on signup, an idea check costs 1, and a market search costs 2 and comes out of a paid pack from $19 for 2 credits.
If none of that list is worth money to you this month, the honest recommendation is the free tool and no account anywhere. That is not modesty; it is the same logic the tool itself applies to your idea.
When theirs is the better choice
- It costs nothing and asks for nothing, which is the right price for a first look.
- It is faster than anything you pay for, and speed is the whole point at the sanity-check stage.
- You want to see what a lot of other founders are working on — they publish trend and aggregate content we do not.
- You are not going to act this month. A free read is the correct spend on a decision you are not making.
They also advertise 285,029 ideas analysed and 300K sessions, read from their home page on 2026-09-19. We have not run their tool and nothing here compares what it returns.
What this page is not
It is not a claim that free tools are bad, and it is not a comparison of output — we have not run theirs, and a page inventing what their score would say on some idea would be the exact failure this site argues against.
It is also a snapshot: their pricing, or the absence of one, was read on 2026-09-19. A free product can introduce a paid tier the week after, and this page will not know.
The short version
- A free score is the right instrument while you are still generating options. Most of the rows in the table above say do not pay.
- Paying starts to buy something at the point where a decision has a cost: a named check you can contest, an answer bound to your constraints, and a published record of the tool's misses.
- On our own benchmark the same one-liner gets opposite verdicts under two founder profiles. A founder-blind number cannot tell you which of those you are reading.
- We publish the successes our own gate rejected. Ask any tool you are about to trust for the same thing.