Trust
Independence and disclosure
This site is published by a company that makes solar software. That is a conflict, and the only honest response is to state it loudly and then remove those products from everything that resembles a recommendation.
Who publishes this
SolarSoftwares is published by SurgePV Technologies Ltd, a company that makes solar software. Two products in this dataset belong to that group:
- Quickest Solar CRM (QuickEstimate) — a commercial partner of the publisher’s group
- SurgePV — the publisher’s own product
The rule applies to the group — SurgePV Technologies Ltd, Heaven Softech and Heaven Designs — not to a single product.
The recusal rule
Both products are:
- Listed, with full profiles, held to exactly the same evidence standard as every other product.
- Disclosed, inline on their own pages and in a line that appears above the content on every page of this site.
- Permanently excluded from every score, ranking, badge, “best” list and finder result.
- Excluded from every comparison page. 28 candidate comparison pages involving them were refused.
How it is enforced
In code, not in an editorial guideline. A guideline can be forgotten by a new hire; a build that fails cannot. The site build asserts that:
- no recused product carries a score;
- no recused product appears in any ranked list, badge or finder output;
- no comparison page references one;
- any page rendering one also renders the disclosure.
A verification pass over the built site confirms zero indexable pages reference either product apart from their own two profile pages.
What it costs us
Both products sit in the two most commercially valuable categories on this site. Recusal means the publisher’s own product can never appear in “best solar design software”, and its partner can never appear in “best solar CRM” — the two pages the business would most want to win. That is the price of being believed, and we think it is the correct trade.
We also publish contradictions we find on our own products. The publisher’s pricing page quotes prices in dollars while adding 18% GST, an Indian tax, for a company described as UK-registered. That is recorded on its profile like any other finding, because a methodology that exempts its owner is not a methodology.
What we do not do
- We take no payment for a listing, a position, a badge or a review.
- We do not let a vendor remove a finding. A vendor gets a right of reply, published alongside, once.
- We do not trade coverage for access. A vendor who stops cooperating gets the same treatment as one who does.
- We do not put third-party ratings into our structured data, and we do not mix them into any score.
If paid placement is ever introduced, it will use a visual pattern reserved for that purpose and will never be mistakable for editorial. Today there is none.