About Solo Stack Lab

Solo Stack Lab is a one-person site. It's run by Shinya, a solo operator, who signs up for AI, SEO, and automation tools and uses them on a real site before writing anything about them. There is no team, no staff writers, and no sponsored placements.

Who does what

Shinya does the testing: creating the accounts, running each tool against a real task on this site, and capturing the screenshots that appear in every review. An AI coding agent (Claude Code) helps run the site: it drafts text, maintains the site's code, and checks the work. Nothing publishes without Shinya's approval, and a review can't go live at all unless the tool was actually used, which the site's own code enforces. Anything a tool or an AI tells us is checked against a source that isn't that tool or that AI before it's repeated as fact. The full rules are on the review methodology page.

What "tested" means here

• Fresh accounts, on the free tier or free trial unless a review says otherwise. Where a paid plan was needed, the review says so.
• A real task on this site, not a demo: an actual RSS feed, an actual published article, our actual domain.
• Prices and trial terms are checked on the vendor's own official page, not on other blogs.
• Every review states when it was tested, because tools change.
• Bugs, dead ends, and unflattering findings are published, since that is the part a spec sheet can't give you.

How affiliate links work

Some links on this site are affiliate links, which means a commission may be paid if you sign up through them. The verdict is written from what happened in testing, not from what a program pays. As of September 2026, that is how it plays out in practice:

• Eight of the seventeen tools reviewed pay a commission through our links. Several of those reviews are among the most critical on the site: Make's silent failure, SE Ranking's paywalled audit detail, Frase's cherry-picked statistic, and Koala AI's non-specific output.
• Three tools declined our affiliate application (Surfer SEO, n8n, and Semrush). We reviewed them anyway, and the Surfer SEO review is one of the harshest we've written.
• Six have no affiliate program at all (Screaming Frog, CoSchedule Headline Studio, Google PageSpeed Insights, Microsoft Clarity, Activepieces, and Ahrefs) and are reviewed on the same standard.

The disclosure page has the formal policy.

Corrections

We get things wrong and we log it rather than quietly fixing it. The Surfer SEO review documents a signup recommendation we made on an unverified claim. The Koala AI review carries a dated correction after Koala's own team told us we'd misread how article saving works. Thepaywall matrix keeps a running log of changes to anything in it.

Send a correction or a tip

If a price, trial term, or feature in a review is out of date, or you can reproduce something we reported, email [email protected]. If it checks out, we'll re-test it and note the change on the page instead of leaving a stale claim up.