People are making the biggest decisions of their lives on star ratings. Billions of reviews out there, and you still can’t find out whether a company will charge you what they quoted. The places you go to check on a business are paid for by businesses. They were never designed for you. We built an entire information economy on partial accounts and called it transparency.
The information was always there. Nobody was asking the right questions. So we did.
Standing Index is where the answers line up, and you can finally compare instead of interpret and assume. You’ve been talking to a wall. Talk to people instead. We’re the alternative: the companies in here aren’t our customers. You are.
Standing Index is a poll-based community forum. It puts people trying to understand a company in touch with people who’ve actually worked with them — creating a record that’s both dynamic and lasting, so consumers get better information than they’re getting from the five-star, business-funded model.
We ask direct questions that get to the heart of what people are trying to understand. That lets you compare between companies and against the industry — so you can see what’s structural and what’s specific to them.
We don’t take money from companies — no ad placements, no reputation management, no referral fees, no partnerships, and we don’t sell your personal information. We rely on broad, low-cost consumer funding instead, so there’s no conflict of interest.
Most people check a few places before deciding on a company. We probably won’t be your only one — but we’re the one you can check knowing no company paid to be in it. No advertising, no partnerships, no reputation management.
That said, we’re also built to do things a review site can’t.
Compare. Two companies side by side on the same questions, or one company against its whole industry. That’s how you tell what’s structural and what’s specific to them.
Collection requests. Review platforms sell collection tools to businesses — a company pays to send invites and gather reviews about itself. We do that work for you instead. If a company has nothing on it, ask, and we’ll go find people who’ve dealt with them.
Straight to the source. Get in touch with people who’ve already left a record about that company. You can’t ask a star rating a follow-up.
It’s closer to a forum than a review site. If you want to actually understand a company, that’s what we’re for.
We’ve all been making decisions on incomplete data for a long time.
Standing Index is being built right now, with help from people who want a platform that puts people first. We’re working to make it as comprehensive as we can — but like any review site, some companies will have limited records.
Here’s what’s worth knowing about the alternative. A lot of the reviews you see elsewhere were collected by the business itself — companies pay for tools that send review invitations, and they choose who gets asked and when. That’s legal and it’s standard practice. (Feel free to look it up.)
We’re doing the opposite. Records here come from people who decided to leave them, not from a company deciding it was a good time to ask.
We built it this way because of exactly this worry.
Reviews go up with your name on them and your words in them. Here, a published record carries a handle — something like @user_a3f9k — and never your name or email address. We don’t ask for your name, so there isn’t one to attach.
The questions are fixed, so you’re not writing your story down unless you choose to. The comment box is optional, and our rules don’t allow names, contact details or personal information inside a record — yours or anyone else’s.
Beyond that, we’re in the same position as any site that holds data. Glassdoor holds your account, Yelp holds your profile, we hold an email. If we’re compelled by legal process we’ll tell you first whenever we’re allowed to.
Yes, we thought about this — it’s why the threshold exists.
We won’t publish one-off records. Nothing goes up about a company until enough people have filed, so what you’re looking at is a pattern rather than a person.
It’s the same reason for the rest of the design. Standing Index exists because the current system makes leaving a review feel exposing, and every decision here works backwards from that.
Our goal is getting corporate-money-free information into people’s hands. So the standing itself — the five bars, the same thing you’d get from five stars anywhere else — is always free.
What costs money is everything dynamic on top of it: the community forums, asking questions of people who’ve left records, starting your own thread, asking us to collect records on your behalf, and seeing how a company’s answers have changed over time.
It’s 99 cents a year, and the number is deliberate. If we don’t take money from companies, this is the only way to fund it — and we kept it as low as we could because we want everyone to be able to use this.
We’re collecting records. We don’t have a launch date.
Right now we’re building the database and forming the communities, so that when this goes live people are connected to the right people. We won’t publish anything until there are enough records to actually tell you something — we’re not rushing into publishing on purpose. We don’t want to confuse you, we want to give you good information.
Most likely certain industries will go live first, and we’ll build out from there.
No. Companies can never pay to change their record.
They can report one, the same way anyone can — and it gets the same answer. A complaint from a company, or a company’s lawyer, doesn’t get treated differently from the same complaint from a member.
Our focus is consumer information, not reputation management. Our customers are the people reading records, and everything we publish serves that — we’ve made it as easy as possible for people to get good information to each other.
We don’t take company money and we have no commercial relationship with the companies in the index.