How we list

A free trial is not a free plan

This is the distinction that rules out the most services. A trial gives you a paid offer for a set length of time, after which it stops or turns into a subscription. A free plan is permanent, and limited in what it does.

Plenty of directories mix the two: it fills a catalogue cheaply. But a reader who came for a trial ends up in front of a sign-up that is not one. A service with nothing but a free plan is not listed here, however generous that plan may be.

One source: the publisher's own page

Every entry is built from the service's official page — its pricing page, or its trial page. Never from a blog post, never from another directory: those pages copy each other and carry lengths that went stale years ago.

The exact address we read is shown at the bottom of every entry, with the date we read it. You can redo the check yourself in one click — that is the point.

Four facts, and nothing else

• How long the trial lasts, exactly
• What it costs afterwards
• Whether a credit card is required
• Whether the subscription renews on its own

These are the four questions you ask yourself before clicking, and they are enough. The rest — the feature list, the reviews, the screenshots — is on the publisher's site, which does it better.

What we will not guess

These facts are not always published, and whether a credit card is required is by far the one publishers most often leave unsaid. When that happens the entry says so, and the “no credit card” filter does not return it.

That is frustrating, and it is deliberate. A guessed “no credit card” that ends in a charge costs the reader far more than a missing answer. When a publisher does state it plainly, their sentence is quoted word for word on the entry, under the conditions.

We date freshness rather than promise it

Publishers change their offers without warning. Promising a monthly re-check would be easy to write and impossible for you to verify.

So every entry carries the date it was last checked, and you judge its freshness yourself. Where the two disagree, the publisher's page is right and the entry is wrong.

What gets turned down

• Services with no trial, however generous their free plan
• Offers whose exact length no official page states
• Promo codes and temporary discounts: a price cut is not a trial

Nothing in return

No publisher pays to appear in this catalogue, and no outbound link is an affiliate link. The day either changes, it will be written on the entry concerned and in the privacy policy, before it goes live rather than after.

If an entry is wrong

Write to contact@hoptrove.com. It is the most useful message Hoptrove can get: a length that changed, a wrong price, a credit card now being asked for. The correction is published with a new check date, and the contact page has links with the subject already filled in.