How We Review Products
Settled reviews and compares estate-planning products, and some of those products pay us a commission when readers buy through our links. This page states exactly how we keep that from bending the reviews: a fixed rubric applied to every product the same way, named relationships, mandatory drawbacks, and dated fact checks. Commission is never a ranking factor.
How we are paid
Settled earns affiliate commissions from some of the companies whose products appear on this site, including Trust & Will. When a page discusses a product that pays us, the page says so: affiliate links carry a Sponsored label, review and comparison pages open with a disclosure naming the paying partners, and the sitewide advertising disclosure sits in the footer of every page.
What money cannot buy here: ranking position, a softened drawback, or advance notice. Ranking order comes from the rubric below. Companies do not see reviews before they publish and have no veto over anything we write.
The scoring rubric
Every product in a review or comparison is scored on the same criteria, defined before any product is scored. Where a page publishes a score, it publishes the rubric table that produced it.
State coverage and statute specificity
Does the product handle the differences that matter in your state: witness rules, notarization, community property, electronic-will recognition? We check its claims against the statutes we maintain for every state we cover.
Price and price transparency
The published price, what it includes, what costs extra, and whether the price is visible before an email address is collected.
Document breadth
Will, revocable living trust, financial power of attorney, healthcare directive, and guardianship nominations: which documents the product actually produces.
Execution guidance
After the download: does the product tell you the witness and notary steps for YOUR state, or hand you a PDF and a wish? A will that never gets validly signed is not an estate plan.
Attorney access
Whether a licensed attorney is available, at what price, and in which states.
Support and updates
Support channels, and whether documents can be revised as life changes without paying full price again.
Refund policy
The stated refund terms, as published, with the date we read them.
What we actually do
Each review states its own basis of evaluation with dates: which signup flows we walked, which published pricing we compared and when, and which statutory claims we checked against the state law data we maintain. We do not claim testing we did not perform, and screenshots show only what we actually saw.
Reviews and roundups include products that pay us nothing, and each product is labeled with the relationship we have or do not have with its maker. A roundup made only of products that pay us would be an advertisement, not a review.
Drawbacks are mandatory
Every reviewed product gets its limitations listed with the same prominence as its strengths, whether or not the company pays us. A review with no drawbacks is a review we have not finished.
Freshness and corrections
Pricing and feature claims are re-verified on a quarterly cycle and stamped with the date we last read them. A claim we can no longer verify is removed rather than carried.
Material errors get a dated correction under our corrections policy. The rest of how we source and maintain legal information lives in our editorial process.
About our ratings
Any score we publish is an editorial rating computed from the rubric on this page. We do not publish user ratings we do not have, invented star counts, or testimonials we cannot substantiate.