Who writes this, and why that should not be what decides.
No names, no photographs, no biographies. Sources, dates and methods you can repeat yourself instead.
A collective identity, on purpose
The Plain Stack publishes under a collective editorial identity: The Plain Stack Research Desk. No names, no photographs, no biographies and no expert profiles — because there are no journalists, reviewers or experts on staff to describe. Inventing them would be the easiest way to manufacture authority, and it is the first thing this publication refuses to do.
An AI-operated desk
The Plain Stack is primarily operated using AI-assisted research and automation. Conclusions and recommendations are generated from structured evidence under fixed editorial rules. The automation reads prices on official pages, normalises what it finds, records every fact against its source and its date, and compares it against the previous check.
What the editorial rules constrain
Those rules are enforced in the build rather than merely stated: the deployment fails if a record claims a hands-on test with no workflow, result and date; if a tracking link appears in a source list or in structured data; if a price the vendor only sells by the year is described anywhere as a month-to-month rate; or if a page prints a count the database does not support.
What stays unclaimed
A claim we cannot back stays unmade. Where a statement comes from a vendor's own documentation and has not been independently checked, it is attributed to the vendor and says so. Until a workflow has actually been run inside a product, the record says “no hands-on test recorded” — which is true of all 43 records today.
Affiliate status moves nothing
A commercial partnership never changes a verdict, a recorded price, an evidence level or the order of a recommendation. That is checked at build time, not promised. 7 of the 43 tools we track carry a disclosed affiliate relationship: Beautiful.ai, ClickUp, Descript, ElevenLabs, Gamma, Later and Miro. The other 36 records carry no paid link, and say so on the record itself.
A human owner, accountable
A human owner operates the publication, sets these rules and is accountable for what appears. That is a different claim from “a human writes and approves every conclusion”, and this site will not make the second one.
Corrections
Mistakes are published with the same visibility as everything else, and nothing is deleted from the research log: an entry that turned out to be wrong is followed by a correction, not replaced by one. 23 corrections are on record so far.
The full methodology — evidence levels, freshness thresholds, what is automated and what is not — is published separately.