Review policy

We publish owner and operator reviews. You may review a device if you or your business owned, leased, or operated it — as an owner, clinical director, provider, operator, finance lead, or former owner. Your badge names your role as well as your verification tier, so readers can tell an owner's payback claim from an operator's uptime report. Reviews must reflect hands-on experience with the specific platform, not a demo, a training session, or a competitor's account of it.

Manufacturers, distributors, their employees, and paid consultants may not submit reviews of their own devices. If you have any commercial relationship with the manufacturer, you must disclose it on the form; disclosed relationships are published alongside the review, and undisclosed ones are grounds for removal.

One review per device per business. You may update your review at any time.

Every owner and operator review publishes in one of two tiers: “Verified owner”, when we have accepted documentary proof of ownership — an invoice, serial-plate photo, financing statement or service record — and “Attested”, when the reviewer signed a legal certification instead, which is what former owners who no longer hold the paperwork use. The Verified tier is proof of ownership, so it stays with owners; every badge also names the reviewer's role, so an operator's review publishes as “Attested operator”. Both tiers require a signed certification and a recorded signal that the reviewer is a real person, both publish only after a person approves them, and both count toward the Device user rating; we never publish a review labeled unverified.

Proof is used only for verification. It is access-restricted to the moderator, never shown publicly, never shared with the manufacturer, and deleted within 30 days of our decision. We retain only the fact that verification succeeded and which route was used.

Your work email is stored privately and is never publicly readable. If you choose anonymous attribution, your identity stays with us and only your role, state and answers publish.

Only the overall 1–5 score and whether you would buy the device again are required — the overall score is the one behind the Device user rating. The four supporting ratings — results, reliability, service and support, and training — can be marked “not applicable” if you can't speak to them, and anything marked that way is left out of every average rather than guessed. Recorded reviews are not offered right now; reviews are written.

$25 per eligible device after publication, email confirmation, accepted ownership proof and the seven-question business questionnaire. ‘Not sure’ and ‘Prefer not to say’ count as answers. Up to three paid devices per reviewer, tracked by email ($75 total under this offer). Positive and negative reviews qualify equally. Devices distributed by our founder’s company are excluded. Existing reviews keep their original offer.

Devices distributed in North America by a company owned by our founder are not eligible for a gift card; those reviews still publish under the same badge rules.

Every incentivized review is labeled “Incentivized” on the device profile.

Reviews of founder-distributed devices are not incentivized.

Before publication you review your write-up for factual accuracy — dates, prices, model numbers. You cannot require removal of accurate statements you later find unflattering.

A published review also carries the exact model or version reviewed, and the year the device was acquired when the reviewer gave it — that year is optional — so readers can weigh a complaint about an older unit differently from one about a current platform.

Sensitive ownership proof is deleted within 30 days of our decision. We retain a non-sensitive, admin-only audit record on the review: the verification method and date, an internal reviewer reference, the device and model reviewed, the evidence type, and the moderator's initials. That record contains no documents, no financial detail and no contact information.

We check every submission against the single removal list below. We edit for typos and remove personal data — we do not soften criticism.

If a review is declined or removed, the notice states the policy reason it failed, and you can appeal within 14 days by replying to that email or writing to hello@aestheticindex.co. A reviewer may publish anonymously — attribution is your choice at submission and can be changed on request.

A manufacturer's, distributor's or dealer's disagreement with a review is never grounds for removing it. Only a policy failure is, and the grounds are exactly the six listed under “How we moderate reviews” below: fraud or fake identity; no first-hand experience of running the device; off-topic content; personal attacks or private information about a patient, employee or other person; an undisclosed material connection to the manufacturer or seller; or a court or regulator ordering it.

Manufacturers may post one public response per review. It publishes under the review as written by the company, unedited, labeled as the manufacturer's response; the review itself stays exactly as the owner wrote it.

Replying to a review is free and always will be; it is included in the free claimed-profile tier and is never gated behind a paid product.

Manufacturers may never remove, edit, or delay a review, and never see your private verification proof, your work email, or your identity when you review anonymously. Membership tiers buy profile features — never influence over reviews, ratings, or FDA data.

If a published review contains a factual error, either the reviewer or the manufacturer can request a correction through our contact page. Corrected reviews carry a visible note stating what changed and when.

A submission that never signs the ownership certification, or for which we never record a signal that the reviewer is a real person, is never displayed publicly and never affects any score. Confirming a work email address is what releases the gift card; it is not what publishes the review. We also never publish a review labeled unverified.

Manufacturers cannot:

• pay to raise ratings
• alter scores
• remove or suppress legitimate reviews
• preview reviews before publication
• receive preferential editorial treatment

Ever.

We publish negative reviews under the same rules as positive ones. See our ownership & conflicts policy.

Reviews from closed communities are never scraped or tallied. All review data comes from owners who submitted it to us directly.

Device user rating = the mean of the 1–5 overall scores from published reviews by owners, operators and clinical directors (Verified or Attested). Founder-distributed devices follow the same rating rules, with the distribution relationship disclosed. It appears from the first published, scored review and is labeled Small sample below 10 scored reviews.

Individual owner and operator reviews are published as they exist. Every role counts toward the Device user rating and the results, reliability, training and support ratings; ownership-economics medians count owner-role responses only, because only owners are asked those questions. The Device user rating appears from the first published, scored review, always with its scored sample size next to it, and is labeled “Small sample” below 10 scored reviews; ownership-economics medians activate only at 20 owner economic responses. Below those sample sizes we publish no aggregate at all — no estimates, no placeholders.

Every published figure is a direct display of a single field owners answered. We never combine fields into a composite or weighted score. See our methodology.

This is the only list. A review is removed or edited for these six reasons and no others:

• Fraud or fake identity — including a review we cannot verify as a real person.
• No first-hand experience of running the device.
• Off-topic content.
• Personal attacks, or private information about a patient, employee or other person.
• An undisclosed material connection to the manufacturer or seller.
• A court or regulator orders it.

A factual dispute is not a removal ground. If a manufacturer disagrees with what a review states, the manufacturer’s reply publishes under the review and the review stays as written.

A negative review is never removed for being negative, and a manufacturer cannot buy, request or negotiate the removal or amendment of one. Manufacturers may reply publicly to any review through /claim; the reply is published next to the review and the review itself stays as written.

Where we edit rather than remove, we edit only the offending passage, we say in the published review that it was edited and why, and we never rewrite a reviewer’s judgement. The same six reasons apply to reviews of the devices the founder’s company distributes — those reviews are accepted and published, and they are the only ones we never pay an incentive for.