About Meln

Meln is an independent publication that reviews AI software for the people who have to pay for it. We cover four categories at the moment: AI humanizers, AI detectors, AI companion apps and AI trading bots. We will add more when we can do them properly.

Where the name comes from

Meln began life in 2023 as an AI product, built by a small team that went through a startup accelerator, launched on Product Hunt and got written up in the tech press. The product did not become a business. The domain, the name and a hard-won scepticism about how AI tools are marketed did survive, and in 2026 Meln relaunched as a review site. If you find an old listing for a "Meln" AI app somewhere, that is us, in a previous life. We know what a pricing page is designed to do because we have written one.

What we cover and why these categories

We started with the four categories where the gap between the marketing and the reality is widest. Humanizers and detectors are two sides of an arms race in which both sides overstate their accuracy. Companion apps advertise a subscription and earn on an in-app currency. Trading bots are sold as "AI" when most of them are grid strategies from 2018. In each case a buyer who reads only the vendor's page will be misled, and in each case the information to avoid that exists but is scattered across benchmarks, court filings, regulator notices and a thousand Trustpilot reviews. Collecting it in one place is the job.

What we promise

Every price on this site carries the date it was checked, and we re-check on a schedule. Every accuracy figure is attributed to whoever produced it, and vendor claims are labelled as claims. Every review says who should skip the product. We do not accept payment for placement, we do not let a commission move a tool up a ranking, and when we cannot verify something we say so instead of guessing. We also do not pretend to have run tests we did not run; where we rely on someone else's testing, we name them.

How we are funded

Affiliate commissions. When you click a link to a vendor and buy, we may earn a percentage. Those links are marked, they carry the "nofollow" and "sponsored" attributes search engines expect, and our disclosure page explains the arrangement in detail. We think the test of an affiliate site is whether it ever recommends against a product that pays. Read our humanizer guide: the tool ranked last pays a commission too.

Who writes this

Every page is written and maintained by Jordan Hale, our editor and lead reviewer. Jordan spent four years inside early-stage AI companies before switching sides. The author page has the full background.

Corrections

If we have a price wrong, a fact wrong or a tool has changed, tell us. We correct quickly and we note material changes on the page.