How we evaluate

AffilReviews360 practises documentary evaluation: we compare services using the documents their providers publish and are bound by — fee schedules, terms of service, entries in regulatory registries — rather than a personal experience you would have no way to verify.

Step 1 — Catalogue

Each section keeps a database of tracked services: name, provider, category, reference price. The catalogue is fed by automated monitoring (specialist forums, sector news feeds, provider announcements) and is limited to services actually offered in the target market — Quebec and Canada for the regulated sections.

Step 2 — Document

For every service kept, we record what the provider publishes: pricing page, terms of service, disclosure documents, and where applicable its entry in the official registries — the Autorité des marchés financiers for financial services offered in Quebec, the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation for deposit coverage, the CRTC for telecommunications. Every record carries a verification date, printed on the published page. Prices change; an analysis without a date is worthless.

Step 3 — Score

Each section has a grid of weighted criteria adding up to 1. A service is scored from 1 to 10 on every criterion, against a scale written in advance that spells out what a 1, a 5 and a 10 look like. The final score is the weighted average — not an overall impression rounded off afterwards. The grid is versioned: when it changes, analyses carry the version that was applied to them.

Example — the grid applied to Canadian digital banks (version v2):

Weights shift by product category: a savings account is judged first on its rate, a credit card on its protections and cash back, a cryptocurrency service on its regulatory framework. Criteria that would normally require prolonged use — perceived support quality, for instance — are scored on what can be verified: published service commitments, stated channels and hours, documented incident history.

Step 4 — Sign off

Nothing is published automatically. Scores are computed and text prepared by our tools, then reviewed and approved by a person, one analysis at a time, before publication. Text that has not been signed off stays a draft, however finished it looks. That is why our sections show few published analyses: the queue is deliberately slow.

Step 5 — Re-examine

Every analysis is revisited on a set interval — 90 days for financial services, 120 for travel, 180 for the other sections — or sooner if the provider changes its prices or terms. An analysis whose verification date has aged says so on the page. If a change moves the score, the score moves; we do not keep a ranking because it suits us.

What this method cannot tell you

Evaluating on the record has limits, and hiding them would be dishonest. It will not tell you how long support actually takes to answer on a Tuesday evening, whether an app crashes on your model of phone, or how a claim goes when it goes badly. It will tell you what the provider commits to, what it charges, under whose authority it operates — and where to check for yourself. For the rest, user reviews and consumer-protection bodies remain your best sources, and we point to them where it helps.

Independence

The grid is applied before any affiliate programme is approached, and no score is ever revised at a partner’s request. No provider reviews an analysis before it goes out. As of today, no affiliate partnership is active on our sites. See our affiliate disclosure and editorial policy.

Spotted an error in one of our analyses? Write to corrections@affilreviews360.com: we fix it and note the correction on the page concerned.