Editorial policy

Most ADHD app roundups you'll find were written by a company that sells an ADHD app. Their product wins. Every time. I want you to know exactly how this site works so you can decide how much to trust it.

Who writes this

One person. Me, Matt Elior. No ghostwriters, no content agency, no anonymous contributors. If that ever changes, every writer will have a named byline and a bio page.

How a tool gets on the list

I add tools three ways. I find them myself while trying to solve a problem I actually have. A reader emails me about one. Or it's already ranking in the conversation and I'd be leaving a gap by ignoring it.

If I ever include a tool because they reached out, I will mention it in the post. No hiding. No arrangement where a company can buy a position in a ranking.

How I test

Minimum 3 weeks of real use before I publish anything about a tool. Real use means I moved actual work into it, not that I clicked through the onboarding and made a demo task called "test."

What I'm looking at:

Whether I can still operate it on a bad executive function day. This matters more than any feature.
How much setup it demands before it does anything useful. High-setup tools fail ADHD users at a rate nobody in marketing wants to talk about.
What happens after week two, when novelty wears off. Almost every app is great in week one.
Whether it survives me ignoring it for four days.
Cost against what you actually get on the free tier.

I test on my laptop and phone. If a tool only works well on one platform, I say so.

Where the money comes from

Some links here are affiliate links, which means I get a commission if you sign up. Every page with affiliate links says so at the top. The commission does not affect rankings, and I've placed tools I earn nothing from above tools I do. I pay for my own subscriptions unless a company gives me a free account, and when that happens I disclose it in the review itself.

Either way: no company gets to see a review before it publishes. No company gets to approve a change.

What I do when a company contacts me

If a company offers a free account for testing, I might take it, and if I do, the review says so in the first paragraph.

If a company disputes something I wrote, I check it. If I got it wrong, I fix it and note the correction. If I got it right, the review stands and I'll tell them why.

Where I get facts

For anything about ADHD itself, I cite primary sources. That means the study, the journal, or the institution that produced the data. Not a blog that cited a blog that cited a press release. If I can't trace a statistic back to whoever actually ran the research, I don't use it.

Sources I go to regularly: CDC, NIMH, peer-reviewed journals, and the published work of researchers like Russell Barkley and Thomas Brown. If a claim comes from a vendor's own research, I flag that in the sentence where I use it.

How I use AI

I work in AI and I use it.

AI helps me with research, finding sources, checking my own reasoning, and cleaning up sentences that came out badly. It does not write reviews. It cannot, because it hasn't used the tool. Every judgment, every ranking comes from me actually using the thing.

No article on this site is AI-generated and published without a human writing and verifying it.

Corrections

I get things wrong. When I do:

Small factual fixes (a price changed, a feature moved) get made quietly and the "updated" date changes.
Anything that changes a conclusion gets a dated correction note at the bottom of the post.
If a review was wrong enough to mislead you, the correction goes at the top.

If you found an error, email me. Include the URL.

How often things get updated

Tool reviews get revisited at least every 6 months, and sooner when a product ships something significant or changes pricing.

What this site will never do

Rank a tool higher because of money. Publish a review of a tool I haven't used. Pretend a tool is ADHD-friendly because its marketing says so. Take down a critical review because a company asked.