How this watchdog works.
We catalog silent pricing and feature changes at AI vendors. If we’re going to call vendors out for opacity, we live by the same standard. Everything below is the truth about how we operate - operations, sourcing, funding, and the dispute path if we get it wrong.
If a receipt is wrong, here’s how it gets corrected.
Skeptics first. Before anything else on this page: if you spot an error in a receipt - or you work at a tracked vendor and want to attach a response - this is the path. No phone tree. No PR review. A single email and a 72-hour clock.
- [01] EMAILSend the receipt URL + what’s wrong.to
corrections@gotnerfed.com - [02] SOURCEInclude at least one primary source backing your correction.vendor changelog, Wayback snapshot, public statement - same bar we hold ourselves to
- [03] RESPONSEWe respond within 72 hours.Corrections are timestamped. The original receipt is preserved with a strikethrough - not deleted.
- [04] RIGHT OF REPLYVendor responses get embedded verbatim.Send official statements to
response@gotnerfed.com. We don’t edit them.
- Was: Framed Claude Code's removal from the $20 Pro plan as a permanent, silent, blanket removal requiring Max ($100+/mo), and cited two off-topic sources.Now: It was a test on ~2% of new signups (existing subscribers unaffected), reversed within ~48h; Anthropic responded publicly and called the site-wide docs update a mistake. Severity lowered from critical to minor; real sources and the vendor response added.primary source ↗
- Was: Claimed Anthropic removed model-version pinning, forcing requests onto a floating model.Now: Anthropic moved newer models (4.6+) to dateless IDs, which its docs confirm are still pinned snapshots - pinning is intact. Severity lowered to minor; harmful jury removed.primary source ↗
- Was: Claimed Suno cut the Pro song quota 35% (1,000 to 650 songs/mo) alongside the V5 launch.Now: No primary source supports a 35% cut, and the figures do not match Suno's credit-based plans. Retracted.primary source ↗
- Was: Claimed a ~18% per-token price increase backdated to the billing-cycle start.Now: No source supports a backdated increase; the documented 2026 retroactive change was the opposite (a token bonus, 10M to 13M). Retracted.primary source ↗
- Was: Claimed Windsurf silently swapped a 'Flex tier' default model, citing a ~12% NerfBench drop.Now: Windsurf has no 'Flex tier' (Flex = promo credits), and NerfBench does not test Windsurf, so it cannot be the evidence. Retracted.primary source ↗
Each promise, one verifiable fact.
Promises without verification are PR. Every card below pairs a commitment with the exact place you can check it - repo file, public inbox, MIT license, GitHub Issues.
- VERIFIABLENo vendor money.
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Zero affiliate links. Zero ad slots. Zero sponsored placements. Source for grep atgithub.com/virtualunc/gotnerfed. - VERIFIABLEBootstrapped. No outside investment.
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Revenue from optional subscriptions only. If we take outside money in the future, you’ll see it here as a receipt against ourselves. - VERIFIABLENo partnerships with any tracked vendor.
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Not paid. Not sponsored. Not under contract. Vendor list at gotnerfed.com/tools - open a PR to add yourself, can’t pay to be removed. - VERIFIABLEEvery receipt is sourced.
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Minimum one primary source URL per receipt - vendor changelog, Wayback snapshot, or public statement. Receipts without sources are not published. - VERIFIABLEMethodology is code, not vibes.
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Scoring rubric inlib/score.ts. Deterministic, no LLM in the score loop. Open a PR if you disagree with a weight. - VERIFIABLEJury disagreement is published.
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3 frontier models grade each change independently. Verdicts shown side-by-side, not averaged. Brier-scored against reality on the public leaderboard. - VERIFIABLESelf-hostable. Forever free for the public site.
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MIT-licensed. Full stack atgithub.com/virtualunc/gotnerfed. Public watchdog site stays free regardless of how the paid business does. - VERIFIABLEPublic roadmap. No surprise direction shifts.
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Every planned change lives in GitHub Issues. If a major change isn’t there, it isn’t planned.
How a receipt becomes a receipt.
Six discrete stages. Each one operates on the artifact from the stage before. No magic; the LLM only enters at the classification step, and never in the score loop.
- STAGE 01Scan
Every hour, our scanner fetches the pricing page, rate-limit doc, and tier-feature page for each of the 23 tracked vendors. HTML is normalized (whitespace, tracking params, dynamic banners stripped) and hashed.
- STAGE 02Diff
When a hash changes, the previous and current snapshots are compared. Wayback Machine is also consulted when available, to extend the diff window beyond our own scan history.
- STAGE 03Classify
A small LLM (
claude-haiku-4-5) extracts the structured change: kind (price-increase, tier-removed, model-swap, …), severity, and a one-line summary. The model’s output is reviewed before publication. - STAGE 04Source
At least one primary source is attached to every published receipt - vendor changelog, Wayback snapshot, email screenshot, or vendor employee’s public statement. Receipts without a verifiable source are not published.
- STAGE 05Jury
Three LLMs (
claude,gpt,gemini) independently grade whether the change is materially harmful. Verdicts are published side-by-side. We don’t average them. The reader sees the disagreement. - STAGE 06Score
Nerf Score (0–100) is computed deterministically from severity, kind, and jury verdicts. Formula and weights live in
lib/score.ts, fully documented on the methodology page.
What we publish, and what we don’t.
- ●Pricing changes
- ●Rate-limit changes
- ●Tier removals
- ●Silent model swaps
- ●Free-tier nerfs
- ●ToS shifts that materially affect users
- ●Feature gating
- ○Speculation
- ○Unverified rumors
- ○Screenshots we can’t source
- ○Bug reports
- ○Outages (separate status page)
- ✕Personal attacks on individual employees
- ✕Screenshots of private conversations
- ✕Leaked internal documents
The fact sheet.
If a vendor offers us money, equity, advertising, or a partnership in exchange for changing how we cover them, we will publish the offer as a receipt against ourselves. That has not happened. If it does, you’ll see it here first.