Editorial Policy & Testing Standards

Main Street Stack exists to give US small-business owners, trade contractors, practice managers, and bookkeepers trustworthy, numbers-first guidance on software and automation. Because a bad software decision can cost a ten-person company thousands of dollars in lost leads or accounting cleanup, we hold every article on this site to strict journalistic and technical standards.

1. How Our Content Is Produced

Modelled scenarios, not field deploymentsOur guides are comparisons and worked scenarios. Costs, feature limits and restrictions are taken from each vendor’s own public pricing and documentation, with the verification date stated beside the figure. Timings, volumes, adoption rates and payback periods are modelled for the business type described — they are not measurements taken from a live deployment, and we do not present them as such. Where a number could only come from running the tool in a real business, we say so rather than supplying one. Use these models as a starting point to check against your own numbers, and confirm any price on the vendor’s page before you buy.

We never publish generic software roundups scraped from vendor marketing pages. Every article must pass four editorial gates before publication:

• Specific Vertical & Job-to-Be-Done Anchor: Every guide is written for a specific operational context—such as an HVAC dispatcher handling overflow calls, a two-chair dental clinic managing hygiene recalls, or a solo bookkeeper reconciling QuickBooks Online receipts.
• Dated USD Price Verification: Software vendors change pricing tiers, per-seat minimums, and SMS/voice overage rates constantly. Whenever we cite a price, we state the month and year it was verified in US Dollars and link directly to the vendor’s official pricing or documentation page.
• Explicit Scoring Rubrics: Our comparison tables evaluate tools on measurable shop-floor criteria: setup time in hours, true monthly cost for a realistic team size, free-tier limitations, integration depth, and failure recovery.
• Mandatory Cons on Every Recommended Tool: No tool receives a pass on its flaws. We set out the bugs, latency limits, contract lock-ins and support bottlenecks documented by the vendor or widely reported by operators.

2. Explicit Disclosure on How We Use AI Tools in Production

Because our publication covers artificial intelligence tools for small businesses, we believe in complete transparency about our own internal workflow:

AI tools may assist in our research and production process—such as drafting from our research notes, structuring comparison table schemas, or checking calculations—but every single article on Main Street Stack is tested, fact-checked, reviewed, and edited line-by-line by a named human editor (the Main Street Stack Research Desk). We never publish raw, unreviewed machine-generated text, and we never use AI to fabricate test results, quotes, statistics, or software prices.

3. Editorial Independence From Advertisers and Affiliate Partners

Our editorial scoring is completely insulated from our revenue operations. Software vendors cannot pay to be included in a review, cannot pay to raise their score, and are never permitted to preview or edit our articles prior to publication. For full details on how referral links work, read our FTC Affiliate Disclosure.

4. Updates, Price Audits, and Corrections Policy

We re-audit our cornerstone and category guides quarterly to check for discontinued free tiers, new per-minute telephony charges, and updated US regulatory guidance (such as IRS 1099-NEC thresholds or FCC TCPA rules). When we update an article, we update the visible dateModified timestamp at the top of the post.

If you spot an inaccurate price, a broken link, or a technical error in any article, please notify us via our Contact page or email contact@vantagedigitalventure.com. We investigate all reader reports within 48 business hours and append a dated correction note whenever a substantive factual change is made.