How a software note on this site is sourced
This guide explains how a note on Mintcanopy gets its facts. It is for a reader who wants to know what was opened, what was not opened, and why there is no star rating.
A review starts from a public page on the vendor’s own site. The image at the top of a review is a screenshot of that page, taken in a browser. It is not a drawing of a product and not a chart built to illustrate a sentence. The Schwab Intelligent Portfolios screenshot includes the line “Pay no advisory fee and no commissions,” so the review is allowed to quote that line as visible. The Fidelity Go screenshot is the hero “Take the guesswork out of investing with Fidelity Go.” The fee table is not in that hero, so the fee sentences cite the Form ADV brochure dated March 30, 2026 instead of pretending the hero contained them. Vanguard’s screenshot is the Digital Advisor hero. The 0.20% and 0.25% gross fees, and the approximate 0.15% net fee, are cited from Vanguard’s advice pages and brochure. Koyfin’s screenshot is the pricing page, monthly toggle, with $0, $39, $79, and $209 visible. TradingView’s screenshot is the pricing page, annual billing, with $12.95, $29.95, $59.95, and $199.95. QuickBooks’ screenshot is the pricing page with both the list price and the three-month discount on each card. Pionex’s screenshot is the homepage promotion, and the fee sentences cite Pionex’s articles because the homepage has no fee table.
What was not done is part of the method. No brokerage account was opened. No bot was started. No QuickBooks file was created. No Koyfin or TradingView login was used to run a screen or an alert. A number that would have required that login is left out. Covered or cropped prices are left out. Koyfin’s Advisor Pro price is cropped, so it is not completed from memory. QuickBooks user counts are absent from the capture, so they are not supplied from another page unless that page is named, and in the review they are simply omitted.
There is no editorial score out of five. A score would be this site’s opinion dressed as a measurement. The published price is the measurement the vendor already made, in the unit the vendor chose. An affiliate link, if one is added later, does not create a score and does not change the unit. Calculators on the tools page apply a rate you type. They do not pull a live balance.
Mintcanopy is the name on the logo. The layout and the type are the template the generator copies. The sentences are written for this publication, about the products above, and they are replaced when a vendor page changes. The check is to open the cited URL and find the sentence. If it is gone, the note is stale.
A check a reader can repeat
1. Pick a review and name the URL in its button. That URL is the page the screenshot is supposed to be. If the image shows a different brand, the review is wrong.
2. Find one price in the text and find it in the image or in the document the text names. Schwab’s zero advisory fee is in the image. Fidelity’s 0.35% is in the March 30, 2026 brochure, which the text names because the hero does not show it.
3. Check that a worked dollar figure is labeled as multiplication. $80,000 times 0.35% is $280. That is not a Fidelity forecast. Six percent of $80,000 is $4,800 of cash at the low end of Schwab’s published range. That is not a Schwab projection.
4. Look for a cropped number that the text refuses. Advisor Pro on Koyfin is the example. Completing it would be a guess.
5. Look for a test the text claims and does not describe. There should not be one. No account, no fill, no backtest.
6. Confirm there is no star rating and no “4.6 out of 5.” The absence is deliberate.
7. Read the category the product sits in. A charting price in dollars and an advisory fee in percent should not be averaged.
8. Open the vendor page again on the day you pay. The screenshot is evidence of what the page looked like when it was captured. It is not a lock on the next invoice.
9. Use the contact form if a cited sentence cannot be found. The correction is to change the sentence or the link, not to add a score so the page looks finished.
10. Ignore the site name as a clue to the method. The method is the cited page, the screenshot, and the list of things that were not opened.
## What a correction looks like
A correction is a change to a sentence so that it matches the page it cites. If Schwab removes “Pay no advisory fee and no commissions” from the Intelligent Portfolios page, the review has to stop quoting it, even if the brochure still supports a related claim. The screenshot would then be evidence of an older page, and it should be described that way or replaced. If Fidelity publishes a brochure after March 30, 2026 with a different step than $25,000 or a different rate than 0.35%, the $280 illustration on an $80,000 balance is retired with the old table. The multiplication can be redone. The old product cannot be left in place because the paragraph is already long.
The same rule keeps invented products out. There is no review of a portfolio tool that does not exist, and there is no fee screen drawn to match a paragraph. If a vendor page cannot be captured, the review says so, as the Pionex fee schedule could not be read as a table and the homepage was captured instead. The articles fill the gap only where they are identified as articles. They do not become the fee schedule by being easier to quote.
Readers who want a score will not find one, including in the page’s schema. The review markup can describe the software and the written note. It does not invent a rating value or a rating count. An affiliate click, should one exist later, is a commercial relationship disclosed on the affiliate page. It is not an input to a ranking, because there is no ranking. The order of the cards is the order of the catalog, not a prize list.
Mintcanopy will show its work by keeping the URL, the date of the document when a document has a date, and the refusal list: no account, no cropped number completed from memory, no star. A page that drops one of those three is no longer following this guide, regardless of how long it is.