When Fakespot shut down in July 2025, the question every former user started asking was simple: what do I use now? Search around and the same two names keep surfacing: RateBud and SureVett. If you're trying to decide between them, this is the comparison I wish existed when I started looking at this space.
I'll get the conflict of interest out of the way immediately: I built SureVett. That means you should read everything below with appropriate skepticism, and I've tried to write it accordingly. RateBud does several things genuinely well, and I'll say so. But it also has a set of documented trust problems that are worth understanding before you install a tool whose entire job is to tell you who to trust.
What RateBud gets right
RateBud is the closest thing to the old Fakespot experience available today. It has the largest user base of the current crop of replacements (roughly a thousand Chrome users) and it covers more than twenty Amazon regional domains, which is broader international coverage than most alternatives offer at launch. It analyzes a product page automatically and returns a trust score plus a letter grade, the same at-a-glance pattern Fakespot users were trained on.
If your only criterion is "give me something that looks and feels like Fakespot," RateBud is the most direct match. That's a real advantage, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Where the comparison gets uncomfortable
The problem with a trust product is that the tool itself has to be trustworthy, or the whole thing is theater. And RateBud has accumulated a few documented issues that cut directly against that.
Undisclosed affiliate links. Reviewers on the Firefox add-on listing have documented that RateBud's "Buy Now" button carried an Amazon Associates affiliate tag without clear disclosure. That matters for two reasons. First, the FTC's Consumer Review Rule and its broader endorsement guidelines require affiliate relationships to be disclosed clearly, not buried. Second, and this is the part that should bother you as a shopper, a hidden affiliate incentive creates a reason for the tool to nudge you toward a purchase regardless of what its own analysis says. When the thing grading the product also earns a commission when you buy it, you deserve to know that up front.
Fake Reddit recommendations. RateBud was publicly called out for posting recommendations of itself on Reddit that were presented as organic, unaffiliated user advice. There's a particular irony in a fake-review detector seeding fake recommendations, and Reddit communities did not miss it. This is the single most damaging thing a trust brand can do, because it reveals the gap between what the product claims to police and how the product markets itself.
Suspiciously uniform scores. Multiple Chrome Web Store reviewers have noted that RateBud tends to return very similar scores, clustered around the low 80s, across a wide range of products, including products that other tools and manual inspection flag as problematic. A score that's roughly the same for everything isn't really a score; it's a number that makes the extension feel like it's working. If the grade doesn't move when the underlying product quality moves, it can't help you tell good from bad.
None of this means RateBud's analysis is worthless. It means you should treat its grade as one weak signal among several, and you should be aware of the affiliate incentive sitting behind its "Buy Now" button.
What SureVett does differently
I built SureVett in direct response to the gaps above, so the design choices map almost one-to-one onto RateBud's problems.
Transparency about money, on purpose. SureVett is free, and I'm explicit about how it stays free. As of this writing there are no affiliate links in the product. When that changes (the plan is to introduce Amazon affiliate links in late 2026 to keep the tool free), it will be disclosed on the Chrome Web Store listing, in the privacy policy, and in the extension itself, before any such link ships. A trust product should never make you find out how it earns money by accident.
Scores that show their work. SureVett doesn't just hand you a letter. It explains why a product earned the grade it did: review velocity, the rating distribution (the "J-curve" pattern that real products tend to follow and manipulated ones don't), verified-purchase ratio, and language patterns in the reviews themselves. The reasoning is the point. A grade you can't interrogate is a grade you can't trust, which is exactly the trap the old system put shoppers in.
Honest marketing. I'm not going to seed anonymous recommendations of my own product. When I mention SureVett, including right now, I tell you I built it. That's the whole policy.
Side by side
| Feature | SureVett | Fakespot (dead) | RateBud | NullFake |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto-analysis on page | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Trust grades (A-F) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Shows reasoning | Yesevery score explained | No | Partial | Yes |
| Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| No affiliate links on Amazon | Yesno URL rewriting | Yes | No | Yes |
| Multi-platform | Chrome ✅ / iPhone soon | Chrome, Firefox, iOS | Chrome only | Chrome only |
| Open source | No | No | No | Yes |
| Active development | Yesthresholds tuned in 2026 | No | Yes | Yes |
Where SureVett actually loses
In the interest of the honesty I'm claiming as a differentiator, here's where RateBud genuinely beats SureVett today:
- Coverage. RateBud's twenty-plus Amazon domains beat SureVett's narrower footprint. If you shop on a non-US Amazon storefront, RateBud may simply work where SureVett doesn't yet. Multi-platform support is on the SureVett roadmap, but "on the roadmap" is not "available now," and I'm not going to dress that up.
- Maturity. RateBud has more users and more time in the wild. SureVett is newer, which means a smaller body of real-world testing behind it. New tools earn trust slowly, and they should.
If those two things are your binding constraints, RateBud might be the better pick for you right now, trust caveats and all. I'd rather tell you that than lose your trust by pretending SureVett is strictly better.
How to actually choose
Here's the decision in one paragraph. If you want the broadest Amazon-region coverage and you're comfortable mentally discounting the score and ignoring the affiliate nudge, RateBud is a reasonable, mature option. If what you care about is a grade that moves with the product, reasoning you can actually inspect, and a tool that's straight with you about how it makes money and how it markets itself, that's the gap SureVett was built to fill. A lot of careful shoppers end up running a review checker alongside a quick manual gut-check: glance at the rating distribution and a few recent reviews yourself, because no single tool is a substitute for paying attention.
The reason I built SureVett at all is that a tool asking you to trust its judgment has to earn that trust in how it behaves, not just in what it detects. That's the standard I want to be held to, including in this post.