About The Rake

A human-centred analysis of tech products

I like to think I'm intentional about the tech products I use. Working in this field, I feel reasonably savvy about how things work. But in reality, my framework for evaluating the products I use every day has always been surface level.

The apps we use are the product of many forces inside the companies that build them. People making decisions that translate into revenue models, data policies, growth tactics, and design choices. Most of us are looking for a simple thing: that the value we get from a product is proportional to what the company extracts from us. But that's a hard thing to see clearly, and companies have little incentive to make it obvious.

I created The Rake as a way to look at that more honestly. Each report covers one company in depth, collecting public sources, applying a consistent scoring methodology, and writing an analysis that tries to make sense of the tensions at play. The full framework is on the methodology page.

Who makes this

I'm Craig, the creator of The Rake. My background is in product design, and I've spent a good few years building products from the ground up at various startups. The spark for this came from a simple conversation about an app that obscured its revenue model. Instead of shrugging and moving on, I thought it could be useful to build something that applies publicly accessible information to a consistent set of criteria.

The research and scoring is assisted by AI agents, but the system behind it has been built and rebuilt by me. Most importantly, the judgment and the writing are mine. That distinction matters, and it's built into the process.

I didn't create The Rake to name and shame companies. Where criticism is warranted, I won't shy away from it. But I'm equally interested in highlighting where companies are genuinely doing right by their users. The aim is honest analysis, not a campaign.

I'm not a data scientist or trained analyst, and I don't pretend the methodology is perfect. If you've built something like this before and can see ways to make it more rigorous, I'd genuinely welcome that input.

A few things worth stating clearly

I don't know what these companies do in private. Everything here is based on public sources.
Public sources are imperfect. I aim to be transparent about confidence levels and gaps in every report.
I have no interest in harming any company, and no affiliation with any company, investor, or advocacy group.
Every report states the methodology version it was scored against, so you can see exactly what criteria were applied.