How We Verify

Every product on It’s Released goes through the same verification process before we publish. Here’s how ItsReleased verifies products, step by step.

This page explains how ItsReleased verifies products from price check to published verdict. Every product passes the same checks: Australian retail price verification including GST, a visible price-checked date, a verdict weighed against local pricing and support, and a public corrections policy when we get something wrong. Nothing is published until each check is done.

One question, every page. Everything we publish has to answer the same question: is this new product worth your money in Australia right now? Every format — a launch, a guide, a comparison, a tool — is judged against that question before it goes live, and the answer always rests on a verified Australian street price and a clear buy-or-wait verdict.

How ItsReleased verifies products: Australian prices

1. We check real Australian retailers. Every price on this site is checked against actual Australian stores — JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys, Harvey Norman, Bing Lee, Kogan, Appliances Online, Amazon Australia, and brand-direct AU stores. We don’t use US prices converted to AUD. We don’t guess.
2. Prices include GST. Every price you see is in Australian dollars and includes GST, exactly as an Australian shopper would pay at checkout.
3. Every price is date-stamped. You’ll see “Price checked: [date]” on every product. Prices change — the date tells you how fresh the number is. If a price is more than 30 days old, we re-check it before featuring the product in any buying guide.
4. We re-verify before publishing buying guides. Our “Best of” guides (robot vacuums, air fryers, and more) get a full price re-check across every listed product before the guide goes live.

How we decide our verdicts

Every launch gets one of four verdicts:

• Worth it — fairly priced for what it offers, or clearly best-in-class. We’d buy it ourselves.
• Wait for a deal — good product, but the launch price is too high. It’ll be cheaper within months.
• Skip — poor value, serious flaws, or beaten by cheaper alternatives already on the market.
• Too early to tell — not enough real-world data yet. We’ll update the verdict once reviews and long-term testing come in.

This is how ItsReleased verifies products before we assign a verdict: we compare Australian pricing vs global pricing, feature set vs established competitors, brand track record in Australia, and warranty/support availability locally. We don’t accept payment for verdicts — ever.

The verdict matrix, broken down

Some launch pages show a scorecard under “Our Verdict”, with three checks scored out of 5. This is that matrix — what each check asks, and just as importantly, what it doesn’t do.

• AU price fairness — is the verified Australian price fair for what this product is? We judge it against the street price we actually checked at Australian retailers (GST included, date-stamped on the page), what the product costs overseas, and where it sits in its category — never against the RRP alone.
• Vs local alternatives — what could an Australian buyer get instead, right now, for similar money? A launch that merely matches a cheaper, established alternative scores low here, however good its specifications look on paper.
• Buy-now timing — does buying today make sense, or is patience likely to pay? Launch premiums, how quickly this brand’s prices usually fall, and how soon a sale season or a successor is due all feed this check.

What the matrix is not: there are no percentage weights and no formula. The three scores don’t add up to the verdict, and no combination of scores produces one automatically. An editor weighs the three checks together, sets one of the four verdicts above, and writes the one-line “Why” you’ll see next to it on the launch page. If a verdict later changes, the change is recorded on our public Verdict Ledger — verdicts are never silently rewritten.

Each verdict also carries an evidence label, shown beside it on the launch page: Spec-checked (specifications and Australian pricing verified against manufacturer and retailer sources), Hands-on (tested briefly), or Long-term use (extended testing). The label tells you how much direct experience sits behind the call — and where the evidence is still thin, the honest verdict is “Too early to tell”. Not every launch carries the full scorecard yet; where it doesn’t, the verdict and its “Why” are still set against the same three checks.

Don’t confuse the matrix with guide scores. Products in our buying guides carry a separate score out of 10, built from the weighted rubric published further down this page. Guide scores use weights; launch verdicts deliberately don’t — a launch verdict is an editor’s judgement, and we label it as one.

When a price drop changes the verdict

A verdict is set at the price we verified when we published it — and prices move. So a verdict can move too, under one rule, applied by a person: nothing on this site flips a verdict automatically.

• The trigger is a verified 15% drop. When a re-check — the same dated check at a named Australian retailer that sits behind our Price Checked stamps — finds a launch’s street price at least 15% below its RRP, that launch goes back to an editor for a fresh value judgement. A smaller drop still updates the price on the page; it does not reopen the verdict.
• A review is not a rubber stamp. The editor re-runs the same three checks as the verdict matrix above — price fairness, the local alternatives, buy-now timing — at the new price. A “Wait for a deal” can become “Worth it” at the lower price; it can also stay “Wait” if the alternatives have dropped too. The drop earns the review, not the outcome.
• Every change is dated, in public. If a verdict moves, the launch page carries the new verdict and its reason, and the change is recorded on our Verdict Ledger with the date and what it changed from and to. Member price reports and price-drop watches can start a re-check, but they never change a verdict themselves — only an editor does.

So far, the rule has not fired. Of the launches carrying a verified street price today, the deepest verified drop is the Tefal YumMeal at $399 against a $449 RRP — 11.1% below it, short of the 15% line. When a launch first crosses that line, its review — and the outcome, whichever way it goes — will be recorded on the Verdict Ledger like every other verdict change.

How we’re funded (and why you can trust the verdicts)

It’s Released is funded through affiliate links and clearly labelled sponsored content. When you buy through a retailer link on our site, we may earn a commission — it never changes the price you pay.

Our promise:

• Affiliate relationships never influence verdicts or rankings
• Sponsored content is always labelled “Sponsored” at the top of the page
• We publish negative verdicts on products from brands whose affiliate programs we use
• Read our full funding disclosure: affiliate and advertising disclosure

Corrections

We get things wrong sometimes — prices change, products get updated, mistakes slip through. If you spot an error, contact us via the contact page with the product name and what’s wrong. We correct verified errors within 48 hours and note the correction date on the page. When we make a correction, we note the correction date on the page so you can see what changed and when — we don’t silently rewrite prices or verdicts after publication.

No pop-ups, no fluff

ItsReleased is built to be read, not fought through. The big comparison sites bury the answer under ad slots, autoplay video and pop-ups; we run none of that machinery. The promise line is the whole policy: no pop-ups, no fluff — just the honest Aussie verdict.

• No advertising clutter. This site carries no display ads and no ad-network placements, and no video on it auto-plays — if a video is embedded in our coverage, it sits still until you press play.
• No paywall. Every launch, guide, tool and verdict here is free to read. A free account exists only for readers who want to vote, watch a price or submit a product — reading never requires one.
• No pop-up traps. No exit-intent pop-ups, no timed overlays, and no email capture laid over the article you’re reading. Our newsletter has its own page; joining it happens there, by your choice.

What you get instead is the check itself: a verified Australian street price with the date we checked it, and a verdict that says what we’d do — including “wait” or “skip” when that’s the honest answer. If any of this ever changes, this page and our Editorial Policy change first.

What we don’t do

These are the lines we won’t cross, no matter how a product is pitched to us:

• We don’t publish rumoured products as confirmed launches
• We don’t use AI-generated “reviews” of products nobody has tested
• We don’t hide sponsored content as editorial
• We don’t inflate prices to make deals look bigger

Why we publish our methodology

We publish this methodology so you can hold us to it. If a price looks stale, a verdict looks soft, or a correction is missing its date, tell us via the contact page — that public accountability is part of how ItsReleased verifies products.

Our scoring rubric

Every product in our buying guides carries a score out of 10. That number isn’t a vibe — it’s built from five weighted criteria, applied the same way to every product. Here’s the rubric, published so you can check our working.

How the maths works: each criterion is scored out of 10, multiplied by its weight, and summed. A product that is merely average everywhere lands around 5–6. Anything above 8 has to earn it — usually by being clearly best-in-class on value or by dominating its bracket on features.

Honest limits of our scores

• We don’t run a test lab. Our scores are research-based: manufacturer specifications, standards certifications, retailer review patterns, and member ratings. Where hands-on testing exists (our own or a trusted reviewer’s), we say so on the page.
• Scores are bracket-relative. An 8.5 in the budget bracket doesn’t mean “better than” a 7.5 premium pick — it means excellent for its price. Always read the verdict alongside the score.
• Scores expire. Prices move and new models launch. Every score carries the price-checked date of the guide it appears in; guides are re-scored when re-verified.
• No score is for sale. Affiliate relationships never touch the rubric — see our funding promises above. We publish negative verdicts on products from brands whose affiliate programs we use.

You’ll see this rubric in action as score-breakdown boxes inside our buying guides, showing each criterion’s contribution to a product’s total.

Shortlists, capped on purpose

You will never find a Top 10 or Top 15 list on ItsReleased. Every buying guide here is capped at seven editorial picks, and most carry five. That cap is deliberate: a list of fifteen products is not a recommendation, it is a catalogue — and making the hard choice for the reader is the whole job of a guide.

• Seven is the ceiling, not the target. A pick earns its place against the scoring rubric above, at a verified Australian price. If only four products in a category clear that bar, the guide carries four — our stand mixer guide under $300 does exactly that, because a fifth pick would have been padding.
• Head-to-heads stay at two. When two products are compared directly, the comparison names both and reaches a verdict between them; it does not sprawl into a round-up.
• Nothing is added to round out a number. Products we considered and rejected stay out of the guide. There is no quota to fill and no slot to sell — a longer list would only dilute the picks that earned their place.

Checked against the guides live today, the cap holds: no buying guide on ItsReleased carries more than seven picks. If a category ever genuinely needs more than seven to be honest, we will say so on that guide and update this page — the cap bends in the open, never quietly.