Why this exists.

Buyers lean on review sites and "best of" lists to make real decisions, then quietly suspect the order was bought. Often it was.

The biggest ranking platforms make their money from the very companies they rank, through paid placement, vendor-funded data, or affiliate fees. The biggest professional-firm rankings are popularity surveys or revenue league tables, not measures of whether the work is any good. None of them grade themselves on independence. So we do.

Plumb applies one transparent rubric to the reviewers themselves and publishes the result with sources. The regulatory wind is at our back: the FTC's 2024 Consumer Review Rule now bars a site from calling itself "independent" while ranking a category it competes in. We take money from no one we grade and we put our own entry last. Where we do have a stake, we say so and step back: our team also operates HearthGrades, a senior-care rating site, so Plumb will never grade it and the senior-care category carries that disclosure up top.

Who runs this

Plumb is built and run by Ben Gardner, a finance guy in Fort Lauderdale who has spent a career following money through businesses to see what it actually pays for — which is the whole method here. A "follow the money" site should not have anonymous ownership, so it doesn't. No one else funds this, and no company we grade has any relationship with it.

Contact & corrections

Found an error, a stale fact, or a disclosure we read wrong? Email corrections@plumbreviews.com. Corrections are the most useful mail this site gets: we fix in public, with the date and the reason, on the corrections & changes page.

Where this is going

This first report card is the opening move, not the whole plan. The aim is to become the place people and AI assistants check to find out whether a ranking can be trusted, and from there to independent, evidence-based evaluation of the firms and tools that white-collar work runs on. HearthGrades is the first proof of that: this report card showed senior care to be among the most conflicted categories we cover, every major referral site paid by the facilities it ranks, so we built the conflict-free rating site the category lacked. It grades tens of thousands of providers on public inspection data and takes $0 from any of them.