Manifesto · v1.0
The ValueIndex Manifesto.
Software discovery is broken. Marketplaces rank by ad spend; review sites rank by affiliate payouts. We rank by four principles — and a product is listed only if it clears the bar on all of them.
The Ad Tax. When you buy heavily-marketed software, you're not paying for the product — you're reimbursing the ads that acquired you. monday.com's sales & marketing spend was
113% of revenue in FY2020 and was still around
51% in FY2024, per its public filings — for years, more than every dollar you paid went to acquisition, not features. Meanwhile a tool like SQLite, funded by a small consortium and spending nothing on ads, quietly runs on every phone on earth. ValueIndex exists to route your money toward builders, not bidders.
A Autonomy
The user's data is not the product.
- No invasive tracking, third-party ad pixels, or data resale.
- Works without an account where feasible; data export is real and complete.
- Self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted, or a substantive privacy policy honored in practice.
- This site practices what it preaches: all search and filtering runs in your browser. No cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party ad pixels. We use privacy-respecting analytics — GoatCounter, an open-source, cookie-free counter that stores no personal data (it's listed in this directory; it passed the same rubric we hold everyone else to), plus PostHog running in cookieless server-hash mode for a short allowlist of product events. No cookies, no local storage, no
identify(), no session replay.
R Return over Infinite Choice
Curated shelf, not infinite shelf — like a wholesale club, not a bazaar.
- Top performer in its category on capability-per-dollar and capability-per-megabyte.
- Solves its core problem completely; no artificial feature-gating of essentials.
- Maximum ~7 products per subcategory. New entrants must displace an incumbent.
E Proof of Work & Technical Efficiency
Benchmarks over marketing claims.
- Measured — not claimed — resource usage: RAM, binary/container size, cold-start, latency.
- Runs acceptably on modest hardware; no gratuitous bloat.
- Actively maintained: security patches land promptly.
T Radical Margin Transparency
Products compete on utility, not marketing budgets.
- Pricing is public, complete, and free of "contact sales" gating for standard tiers.
- Business model is legible: open source, bootstrapped, or clearly disclosed funding.
- The Ad-Tax Test: R&D spend should meet or exceed sales & marketing spend. For public companies we read the filings; for private ones we use proxies — paid-ad footprint, affiliate/review-site saturation, sponsorship blitzes versus changelog velocity.
- No dark patterns: no hidden renewals, hostile cancellation, or bait pricing.
The score: Arete
Each product is scored 0–5 on each principle; the average is its Arete score. Arete (ἀρετή, “AH-reh-tay”) is Aristotle’s word for excellence — the virtue of a thing fulfilling its purpose well. He judged a knife by how it cuts, not by how it’s sold. That is this manifesto in one sentence: we judge software by how well it performs its function, not by how well it’s marketed.
Directory rules
- Ranking signal: Arete score only (the average of the four principles, 0–5). No paid placement, ever.
- Free listing, forever: we never take money from listed vendors — no commissions, no listing fees, no "premium profiles". A directory funded by the products it ranks is an ad network with extra steps. Our revenue comes only from users who hire us to install and maintain tools for them.
- Verification: every listing is scored against a published rubric. Entries marked provisional carry seeded estimates pending a full manual pass; verified entries carry evidence a stranger could re-check.
- Delisting: a verified principle violation — an acquisition that changes the model, dark patterns, abandonment — triggers review and delisting.
- Disclosure: any commercial relationship between ValueIndex and a listed product (e.g., managed hosting) is disclosed on the listing.
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