How do you judge a day-one launch when every review is five stars from people the maker knows? Tried it

The one I would add is about the maker rather than the tool, and it is uncomfortable but it is the most predictive thing I use: how many things are they running at once?

A solo maker launching their fourth product this year is not going to be maintaining the first three. That is not a character flaw, it is arithmetic. If the thing you are adopting is going to sit under your daily work, you are betting on continued attention, and attention is the scarcest thing a small team has.

The reverse is a strong buy signal. Somebody who has shipped one thing for three years and is still answering questions about it will probably still be there when you have a problem.

Your open-source proxy is decent but it is doing less work than you think, and I would swap it for a sharper test.

Open source protects you from the company disappearing. It does not protect you from the company losing interest, which is far more common — an abandoned repository you technically could maintain is not meaningfully better than a dead product, unless you were going to maintain it, and you were not.

The test I actually use: can I get my data out today, in a format something else reads, without asking them. That covers the abandonment case, the price-rise case and the acquisition case in one question, and it works identically for closed source.

Open source is then a bonus rather than the criterion. Plenty of closed tools pass this and plenty of open ones fail it because the format is theirs even if the code is not.

Your first habit is the best one and I would push it further: what people say they came from is not just the most reliable signal on the page, it is often the only real content on it.

"I was using X and switched" tells you the category the tool is really competing in, which is frequently not the category it claims. A thing marketed as a workflow platform whose reviewers all came from a note-taking app is a note-taking app. That is genuinely useful and no amount of star ratings would have told you.

Two more that have held up for me:

Does the description say what it does not do. Anything honest has a boundary. A page where everything is a strength was written by somebody who has not used it under load, or who is hiding the boundary, and you will find it in week two.

Is there a version number or a changelog. Not for the version itself — for the evidence that this is the eleventh thing they shipped rather than the first. A maker who has been iterating in public for a year is a much better bet than an identical tool that appeared fully formed last Tuesday.

One correction to a thing people repeat, since you mentioned pricing shape: a free tier is not evidence of anything and is frequently the opposite.

A generous free tier at launch is a customer-acquisition decision made when there are no customers. It tells you what the economics look like at zero scale, which is not the situation you are evaluating. The tiers that matter are the ones just above where you would land, because that is what you will actually pay in six months, and those are usually the least-designed part of the page.

If the pricing page goes free, then a reasonable tier, then "contact us", assume you will be in the contact-us tier sooner than the page implies.

Cheap addition: give it the boring task, not the impressive one.

Everybody trials a new tool on something novel, because that is the fun part and it is what the demo showed. Then they adopt it and spend 90% of their time on the boring repetitive thing, which nobody tested, and that is where it turns out to be slower than what they had.

First hour of any trial: do the thing you do forty times a week. If it is worse at that, nothing else matters.