Why we built another review site

Review platforms started as a way for customers to warn each other. Somewhere along the line most of them became a way for businesses to manage their image, and the tools for doing that were sold back to the businesses at a price. The people writing the reviews were the product, and the score at the top became something you learnt to discount.

TheReviews is an attempt to put the reader first without pretending businesses do not matter. Businesses matter a lot. They are the ones who send the invitations that make a review verifiable, and they are the ones who reply. So we charge them for reach and tools, and we refuse to charge them for moderation. That line is the whole idea.

Three rules

Verified by default. A review tied to a real order carries a badge and full weight. Organic reviews are welcome and they count, at seventy per cent. Both are labelled. Nothing is blended.

Nothing is hidden for money. There is no plan, no account manager, no back channel that removes a review. Reviews come down when they break a written guideline, a person decides, and the decision is logged where anyone can read it.

The formula is published. The score is one equation, printed on the trust page with a worked example. You can recompute any business's score from the reviews on its page. If the numbers do not match, that is a bug, and we would like to hear about it.

Who is behind it

TheReviews is built and run by Ikaroa, a digital product studio, as a venture of TJG. It launched in 2026. The team is small and the code that does the important things, the score and the fraud checks, is short enough to read in an afternoon. We keep it that way on purpose.

We make money from the paid plans on the pricing page. We do not sell data, we do not run ads against reviews, and we do not take a cut of anything a business sells.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections, press: email@thereviews.net or the contact form. If you have found a security issue, email the same address with “security” in the subject and you will hear back within one business day.