Five tools, none of them gated

The order matters more than it sounds. A calculator answers a question you have already framed — what a retainer would have to return, what a build should cost, what slow replies are costing you this year. The checker frames a question most owners have never asked at all, which is whether the systems their customers increasingly ask for a recommendation have ever heard of them.

If you run the checker and your business is named consistently, the AI search work is not your priority and one of the calculators probably points at something that is. That is a perfectly good outcome for a free tool, and it is why none of these ask for your email before telling you.

There is a second reason, and it is less generous: a gated calculator does not have to be honest. Nobody can check the assumptions inside a tool they never reached, so the incentive runs toward flattering outputs and invented benchmarks. Publish the thing openly and every input, default and omission is visible to anyone who wants to argue with it — including the agency whose proposal you just modelled.

That is the same reason the price ladder is published in full. An estimator can only be as honest as the numbers behind it, and numbers you cannot see cannot be checked.

The visibility checker has a different limitation, and it is stated on its own page: AI assistants are non-deterministic, so a single run is a snapshot rather than a measurement. Reading one result as a trend is the most common mistake people make with it.