About & editorial policy

Who writes this

The Small Operator is written by Jeff Peckham. One person, working alone. There is no editorial team, no reviewers, and no organisation behind the name.

What it covers

Software and services that small operators pay for out of their own money: email tools, hosting, scheduling, accounting, AI tools, and whatever else turns out to matter. The recurring questions are the same in every category. What does it cost at the regular price rather than the introductory one? Which conditions change that price? What does the vendor's documentation leave out? And if you already use something else, what does moving actually involve?

The intended reader runs something small — a newsletter, a shop, a practice, a class — and has no procurement department to absorb a bad decision.

How products are evaluated

Every factual claim here falls into one of three grades, and articles are written so you can tell which one you are reading.

• Documented. Taken from the vendor's own current pricing page, documentation, or help centre, with the date it was read. Reported as what the vendor says, not as verified fact. Where a vendor's own pages disagree with each other, you will be shown the disagreement rather than whichever figure suited the argument.
• Observed hands-on. Something actually done in the product, described at the scope it was actually done. If that was one account over two days, or three contacts, or a single email, the article says so in those words. A displayed limit is reported as a displayed limit — not as a limit anyone pushed the product to and watched it enforce.
• Unresolved. Questions that matter and have not been answered. These stay visible in the article rather than being quietly dropped or filled with an assumption.

Hands-on testing is expensive and slow, so most products in most articles will not have had it. That creates an obvious hazard: the product that was tested gets more words and more specifics than the ones that were not, which can read as endorsement. Articles are written to resist that, and say plainly that better-evidenced is not the same as better.

What this publication will not do

No invented readership, traffic figures, awards, testimonials, credentials, or publication history. No fabricated staff. No claim to have tested something that was not tested. No recommendation that cannot survive the reader checking the vendor's own pricing page afterwards.

Affiliate disclosure

As of now, no affiliate relationship exists for any product discussed in the first article. Nothing on this site currently earns a commission, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on it.

That may change. If an affiliate relationship is established later, then:

• it will be disclosed in the articles it affects, not only on this page;
• the disclosure will appear before the recommendations it could influence, not buried at the bottom;
• the evidence standard above will not change because a product pays a commission — a documented claim stays documented, and an untested product stays described as untested.

That is a statement of intent about how this publication is meant to work. It is not a legal guarantee, and you should not have to take it on trust: the practical check available to any reader is whether the recommendations still include options that pay nothing, and whether “stay where you are” is still on the table when it is the right answer.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed, and the correction is noted in the article rather than made silently. Prices in particular go stale — every article states the date its figures were read, and that date is the honest limit of what it can tell you.

That applies to errors in the reasoning, not just errors of fact.

Contact

This publication does not have a public contact address yet. One will be listed here once its mailbox is working. Until then, there is no way to send a message through this site.