How we score suppliers

What the score counts

We score published evidence. Each of the six criteria below is something a supplier has either put in public or has not, and each one is something you could check yourself without taking our word for it. A supplier scoring 6 out of 6 has published six checkable things.

This score counts published evidence, not product quality. A vendor scoring 6 out of 6 has published six things a reader can check. It is not a statement that a product is pure, correctly dosed, safe, or legal for anyone to obtain.

1. Publishes a certificate of analysis. At all, for anything, without needing an account to see it.
2. Named independent laboratory. The COA identifies the lab that issued it and that lab is not the supplier. An unattributed certificate is a PDF.
3. Traceable to a batch. The COA carries a batch or lot number that corresponds to what is being sold, rather than floating free of any particular production run.
4. Dated within twelve months. A COA from four years ago describes a batch nobody is shipping.
5. States where it ships. If we cannot establish the territory, we cannot tell you whether the listing is any use to you.
6. Checked by us recently. A person opened the site, confirmed the five points above, and recorded the date. Past 120 days the listing is shown as unverified rather than left to age quietly.

What the score is not

We do not test anything. We hold no laboratory, we run no assays, and we have no way to tell you what is actually in a vial you have bought. We cannot verify that a published COA is genuine, that the batch it describes is the batch that ships, or that a supplier will behave the same way next month as it did on the day we looked.

So the score is a measure of transparency, not of quality, purity, safety or legality. A supplier can publish six perfect documents and still sell you something worthless. We would rather give you a number that means one narrow thing precisely than a number that implies a judgement we are not in a position to make.

What we are paid

Some outbound links pay us a commission. Where that is the case it is stated next to the link, above it rather than in the footer, and the wording is generated from the same record that generates the link. There is no code path that produces a paid link without producing its disclosure.

Payment cannot move a score. That is not a promise, it is a property of how this is built: the score is computed from the six criteria above and the commercial relationship is a separate field that the scoring function never reads. A test in the build asserts that joining a program leaves a supplier's score unchanged.

Current listings

We currently list no suppliers. The method above is in force and the site is built to display and score listings, but none has been added yet. When that changes, the entries appear here first.

Telling us something is wrong

If a supplier listed here has stopped publishing testing, changed hands, or is doing something a reader should know about, say so through the contact page. Removing a listing costs us money and we will still do it.