Evidence & confidence

What our numbers mean, and where they come from. This page explains how to read the site; the figure-by-figure sourcing lives in the maintained evidence ledger.

What the scores are

The eight category scores (0–100) are editorial scores — reasoned judgements built from public, verifiable data: manufacturer specifications, warranty and support documentation, published parts pricing, SDK and API docs, app-store listings, and credible reliability reporting. We do not run first-person lab tests, and no wording on the site should imply we do. The overall score is a transparent weighted calculation of the eight, not a separate opinion — see the methodology.

The five confidence tiers

Factual fields — price, subscription, availability, server dependency, company status — are each classified by how well we can source them:

Tier	Meaning
Verified	Confirmed on an official manufacturer source (and, where noted, a second independent source).
Claim	The manufacturer's own published figure, not independently checked.
Reporting	From credible third-party reporting rather than an official page.
Inference	An editorial estimate — no published figure was found. Treat as approximate.
Unknown	Not established. Shown as unknown on the site, never guessed or filled in.

We would rather show "unknown" than a confident-looking guess. A robot's warranty length, for example, is often unpublished — where we cannot source it, we say so instead of inventing a number.

Where the figures come from

Every category score on a robot's profile links (via a small ⓘ) to the public source it was reasoned from. Prices link to the official store and carry a "data checked" date, because robot prices move often. The complete figure-by-figure record — each price, status and subscription with its source URL, confidence tier and date checked — is kept in the evidence ledger and updated in the same change as any data edit.

Longevity grade & True 3-Year Cost

Two derived numbers appear across the site. The Longevity Grade (A–F) combines server dependence, subscription dependence, company stability and repairability. The True 3-Year Cost adds three years of any required subscription to the purchase price. Both formulas, their inputs and their known limitations are documented on the methodology page, and both are computed in data/scoring.js so the site and the profiles always agree.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong or out of date, tell us via the BestMatch Group contact route. Verified corrections are applied at the next data pass and reflected in the "data verified" date. Our most recent full verification pass corrected 14 figures — including the Unitree Go2 price and iRobot's company-risk status — which is exactly the process this page exists to make visible.