Independence
Who pays us, and what that money cannot buy.
Public benchmarks on this site are free and will stay free. Nobody pays to be included, and nobody can pay to be left out. This page states how we earn money instead, and the specific things that money has no effect on.
How we earn
Custom benchmarks, funded by buyers.
We offer custom benchmark projects for teams choosing B2B data providers. Together we define the question, the providers to compare and the evidence needed to make a decision. Scope, deliverables and price are agreed for each project.
We do not accept vendor-funded testing, sponsorships, referral commissions, paid placements or paid evidence licensing. Public benchmarks remain free to read.
The firewall
What money cannot buy.
A place in a public benchmark, or removal from one.
The date a result is published, or a delay.
A rerun that other vendors in the same benchmark do not get.
A look at non-public results before publication.
Any change to a score.
For data providers
How we treat the providers we test.
If you sell B2B data, you may appear in our benchmarks. This section and the ones below set out what that means for you.
We do not share non-public results with vendors before publication. After publication, providers can submit factual corrections with supporting sources.
We do not sell testing to vendors. Our commercial work is funded by buyers choosing data providers. We do not offer vendor-funded private testing or paid market research for providers.
Providers can point us to public product documentation and submit evidence of factual errors in published work.
How we choose what to test
The rules are fixed before the numbers are known.
What the first two benchmarks did. Benchmark 01 and Benchmark 02 were not pre-registered. The vendor list, the inclusion criteria and the scoring rules were published with the results, not before the run. The published methods, scoring rules and supporting data let readers inspect the findings, while each study identifies artifacts that remain unpublished. A reader cannot confirm that the rules were not adjusted once the numbers were in.
What we commit to from the next benchmark onward. We publish the vendor list, the inclusion criteria and the scoring rules before the run begins, as a timestamped commit in our public repository, so that the rules cannot move after the results are known.
A vendor that meets the published criteria is tested. Vendors cannot opt out.
Disclosure
Vendor relationships at publication.
We do not accept payments from the vendors we evaluate.
For Benchmark 01 and Benchmark 02: no vendor in either study had any commercial relationship with Benchology at publication.
Mistakes
When we get something wrong.
We fix it, and log the date and the change on the corrections page, with the original wording kept alongside so the change can be checked rather than taken on trust.
If a published figure about your product is wrong, send us the evidence.
Custom benchmarks
Discuss a custom benchmark.
Bring your ICP and the providers you want to compare. We will agree the question, scope and deliverables with you.