How TrustedMetrics works
Every audit, every score, every leaderboard placement is observable telemetry — and structurally separated from any revenue stream. This page is the contract.
The five pillars: Audience Authenticity (bot-detection on followers), Engagement Quality (like-rate / comment-rate signal), Verification Depth (platforms / payment providers / domain / social verified), Platform Presence (multi-platform consistency), and Professional Reliability (domain age, business records, history).
The numeric score and the verdict label appear together, everywhere — never one without the other. Verdicts are EXCELLENT (80–100), GOOD (60–79), MEDIUM (40–59), CAUTION (0–39).
1. Click-parity ratio
Decisive clicks to cancel ÷ decisive clicks to sign up. The NYC DCWP equal-ease rule sets ≤ 1.2× as the substantive bar. We pass-mark at 1.2× and below; caveat 1.2–1.5×; fail above 1.5×.
2. Time-to-cancel
Wall-clock from cancel-page load to confirmation. Pass ≤ 30 s; caveat 30 s – 3 min; fail above 3 min.
3. Retention modal count
Number of overlays / modals / interstitials between cancel-click and Stripe Portal (or vendor equivalent). Pass = 0; caveat 1; fail 2+.
4. Stripe Portal directness
Boolean: presence of a direct link to billing.stripe.com (or equivalent vendor portal) inside the cancel flow. Pass = direct link visible.
5. Confirmation latency
Time from final cancel click to confirmation render. Pass ≤ 5 s; caveat 5–60 s; fail above 60 s (e.g. "we will email you in 14 days").
6. Mobile parity
Boolean: same flow renders on mobile viewports. Pass = parity. Mobile-only or app-only-cancellation gates fail this signal.
7. Reactivation friction
Clicks required to resume from the cancel-pending state without re-entering payment details. Pass ≤ 2; caveat 3–4; fail above 4.
Every audit captures the seven signals as numbers, booleans, or counts — never as interpretive labels. Operators may disagree with our pass/fail thresholds; they cannot disagree with the captured numbers themselves.
Pristine surfaces (no ads, ever): public profile pages (/[username]), all trust leaderboards, all embeds (/embed/*), the entire dashboard (/dashboard/*), and all marketing pages. Ads on a trust-rating surface erode the credibility of the score; we don't do it.
Monetized surfaces: the cancellation leaderboard (/cancellation-leaderboard), per-company cancellation deep pages (/[username]/cancellation), and the alternatives page (/[username]/alternatives). These carry tasteful display ads, sponsored "Verified Easy Cancel" slots (audit-gated, see below), and Chinese-wall affiliate links (separated from rating data, see below).
The top three slots on /cancellation-leaderboard can be reserved as sponsored placements — but only by companies currently passingall seven audit signals. Payment alone is insufficient. If a sponsored target's next audit drops to fail, the slot is auto-paused and refunded pro-rata.
Sponsored slots are visually distinct from organic top-3 rows (badge label + audit timestamp always visible). We never hide the sponsorship.
Affiliate links never appear on a rating surface. Cancellation deep pages (/[username]/cancellation) do not contain affiliate links. Suggested alternatives live on a separate page — /[username]/alternatives— reachable only via an explicit "See alternatives" link.
Each alternatives page carries an FTC-compliant disclosure header and links back to this methodology page. The audit team and the partnerships team are operationally distinct; an affiliate relationship cannot influence a target's audit score.
Ratings are not for sale. No company has paid, can pay, or will ever be able to pay for a higher TrustScore, a higher cancel-friction score, or a leaderboard position outside the audit-gated sponsored top-3 (which itself requires passing the audit). If you find evidence to the contrary, write to [email protected] and we will publish the correction.