Yes, we're those people.
The ones who tried Cursor on day one. The ones who paid for Jasper, then Writesonic, then Frase, then realized we'd been billed for three of them simultaneously for four months. We turned that obsession into a publication so you only have to read about the tools that survive. The rest get cried about and buried.
What Tool Crier actually is
Tool Crier is a publishing operation that covers AI tools with the same energy you'd bring to a bad breakup: specific, documented, and not particularly interested in being fair to the party that emptied your bank account.
We publish three types of content:
- Reviews — single-tool deep dives after months of actual use. We don't review tools on press-release day. We review them after we've rage-quit three times and come back.
- Comparisons — head-to-head analysis where we pick a winner. We don't do the hedge of "both are great for different use cases." We tell you which one to buy and why.
- Pricing Watch — the beat nobody else runs with consistency. Who raised prices without a notification email. Who moved features to a higher tier. Who calls it "unlimited" and means "subject to fair use limits you'll only discover at 3 AM."
How we make money
Affiliate commissions. If you click a link on Tool Crier and buy a subscription, we may earn a referral fee — typically 20–30% of your first payment, or a flat CPA rate, depending on the program. We link to affiliate programs for tools we've reviewed. We don't review tools because they have affiliate programs.
We've said "Skip" on tools that pay high commissions. We've given "Recommended" to tools with no affiliate program at all (Cursor, as of this writing, has no affiliate program — we still cover it because it matters to our readers).
Every article with affiliate links carries a disclosure at the top. We're not going to make you hunt for the asterisk.
Our testing methodology
We pay for our own subscriptions. We don't accept free access in exchange for coverage. We don't give vendors a preview of our reviews before publishing.
For reviews: minimum 90 days of active use. For comparisons: we run both tools on the same workflow, the same prompts, the same content — not cherry-picked demos. For pricing watch: we screenshot pricing pages monthly and diff them. We keep receipts.
What we don't cover
We don't cover everything. There are 400 AI writing tools and life is short. We prioritize tools that are meaningfully different from each other, tools that people actually pay significant money for (the $20–$200/month category is our sweet spot), and tools where the pricing situation is opaque enough that a watchdog function adds real value.
If a tool launched last week and has 200 users, we're not covering it yet. Ask us in six months.
Contact
Tips, corrections, and partnership inquiries: [email protected].
We respond to corrections quickly. We respond to "can you remove the negative coverage" slowly and the answer is no.