ToolScore

The industry profits from the fog. We sell the meter.

The internet is buried under information, and yet the simple questions have no short answers: which one is the better deal, which one is safe, what do you actually get for the money. The information exists — scattered across Reddit niches, GitHub issues, forum threads, and the heads of people who already paid to learn it. ToolScore collects it, checks it, and translates it: two hours of digging compressed into five minutes of reading. No hype, no hollow stars, no reviewers who don't use the thing they review.

How ToolScore works: from chaos to a 5-minute decision Diagram: the fog of Reddit threads, GitHub issues, marketing and hidden pricing goes in; ToolScore collects, verifies and translates; out comes a five-minute answer — what's better for you, why, and what it costs. THE FOG Reddit threads GitHub issues · HN marketing claims hidden pricing hype & stars ToolScore collect — every source, dated verify — claims re-searched, labeled or cut translate — hours-per-dollar, real limits, full-stack cost 5 MINUTES what's better for you why — with the reasons what it really costs
The translator's job: insiders already know this. You shouldn't need their scar tissue.

The three promises

💰 The real bill, not the marketing one

Hours of work per dollar, real limits, the cost of the whole stack — not the sticker price.

🧠 The “why”, not just the ranking

Every pick carries the reason an insider would give you over coffee.

⚠️ No hidden traps

The fine print, the promo price that jumps on year two, the “free” that isn't.

I paid the tuition

ToolScore isn't written by a content farm. It's written by someone who kept paying for the fog with his own money. A few receipts:

  • ▸I built a PC around a 5090 to run local AI. The local LLMs of that moment were… not the ones from the keynotes. Great card; wrong decade for what I asked of it.
  • ▸One month of Claude Code lasted me days, not weeks. Very educational. Very fast.
  • ▸I added a 3060, then a 3080 Ti, to run Qwen 27B locally. Lovely hobby, mediocre employee — plenty of context window, not enough workhorse.
  • ▸I was ready to pay routing margins for GLM Flash — then I checked the vendor's own site and found the same capability priced like a rounding error. That fact existed nowhere in public. That's the moment this site became inevitable.
  • ▸I build automation and write software for a living-ish. I've taken on more things at once than is sensible — yes, I'm greedy. Greed is how you learn where the bills hide.

The moral: I paid full price to learn this. ToolScore is the discount I wish had existed.

One more thing — the fog isn't stupidity, and smart people get lost in it too. Praise gets monetized, criticism doesn't; algorithms pay for attention, not usefulness. Here's how the game works, and the map.

What I'm running right now

Living section — updated when reality changes, not on a schedule. Last update: September 2026.

  • ▸Daily driver: a GLM-based coding agent — this entire site (pipeline, data, build) is produced with it, so the burn-rate talk here is field data, not theory.
  • ▸Local lab: 2× RTX 3060 12 GB — quantized LLMs, TTS experiments, small fine-tunes.
  • ▸Voice: a self-hosted TTS pipeline that produces complete audiobooks. The standardized samples for our upcoming TTS category are generated on it — same text, same chain, no marketing.
  • ▸Currently paying for: one coding-agent plan + raw API keys. Everything else in the rankings is sourced community data and labeled as such.

How this site makes money

ℹ️ Affiliate links — never scores
Some outbound links are affiliate links. They never change a score, and tools with no affiliate program at all regularly top our rankings — that's the proof. Full details in the disclosure; the scoring pipeline has no knowledge of the money.

Found a stale number, or want a tool added to the rankings? Tell me — stale data is a bug.