How our engine works
Five steps, and one architectural rule that makes the first four trustworthy.
The audit-to-escrow pipeline: five steps from sprawl to savings
No account required to see your blueprint — only needed for rebate tracking.
You tell us your industry, size, and spend
Three questions — no invoice upload, no account required to see a result. It's enough for the engine to place you against a curated map of what businesses like yours actually run.
A blind engine ranks tools on fit alone
Each tool in our catalog is scored on how well its team-size band matches yours and how densely it integrates with the rest of the stack. That scoring code has no access to commission or rebate data — it is a separate module in our codebase that the ranking logic never imports. The ranking is decided before money enters the picture.
Fit vs. cost is the only tradeoff the ranking function is allowed to weigh — commission never enters the calculation.
You get a 4-pillar blueprint and a savings number
Sales & Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Admin & Security — one blueprint, with the categories it consolidates listed next to each pick, and what the optimized stack costs against what you told us you're spending today.
Adopt a tool, and we attribute it to you
Clicking "Adopt" routes you to the vendor with a tracking id tied to your account, so the referral fee the vendor pays is correctly credited back to your rebate — not lost to a generic link.
Your credit sits in escrow until the vendor actually pays us
Referral payouts can take time to land after activation, and can be clawed back if you churn early. So your implementation credit is held for 60 days from the moment you adopt a tool — shown as pending in your dashboard the whole time — and only becomes payable once that hold clears. We'd rather show you an honest pending status than promise cash we don't have yet.
Your credit sits behind a 60-day hold — visible as pending, never front-loaded as cash we haven't received.
The one rule that makes this work
"Our engine can't see who pays us" is only worth saying if it's a property of the code, not a promise about our intentions. In our system, the ranking function and the commission/payout data live in separate modules, and the ranking function has no import path to the commission data. A reviewer with source access can check that directly — it isn't something you have to take on faith.
The same rule, across every product line
Software
The 4-pillar blueprint for all 101 industries is scored by lib/recommend.ts against team size and integration fit alone. Affiliate rebate amounts are only looked up afterward, to build the checkout link — never before, and never as a ranking input.
Business credit cards
We don't have issuer partnerships yet, so every card link today goes straight to the issuer's own site — no affiliate tracking, no rebate. When partnerships do exist, they'll follow this same rule: what we're paid can't affect which card is shown first.
Insurance
Same story — no carrier partnerships yet, so policy pages link directly to each provider's public site. Coverage and pricing guidance is educational, not a quote engine.
The ranking function reads team-size fit and integration density. The commission ledger reads vendor payout terms and your subid. Neither module can call the other — that separation is what makes the claim checkable instead of just reassuring.
Frequently asked questions
Is StackMatch free to use?
Yes. The audit, your blueprint, and the savings estimate are all free, with or without an account. We're paid by software vendors when you adopt a tool through us — not by you.
If vendors pay you, how do I know the recommendations aren't biased?
Because the ranking code and the commission data live in separate, non-importing parts of our codebase — see the rule above. The engine that scores fit has no code path to read who pays us, so it structurally can't rank on it.
Do I have to buy through your links to use the blueprint?
No. The blueprint tells you exactly which tools to run and why. Adopting through our link just attaches your account so the rebate gets credited to you instead of going unclaimed.
How is this different from a "best software 2026" listicle?
Listicles rank generically, for everyone. Our engine ranks for your specific headcount and spend, one tool per job — most listicles don't even attempt to tell you which of 10 similar tools is actually sized for your team.
What if my industry isn't covered yet?
We've hand-curated 101 industries so far, from HVAC and dermatology to law firms and property management, each with its own tool set and pricing data. If yours genuinely isn't listed yet, the audit will tell you honestly instead of guessing at a generic estimate.
What happens to my implementation credit if I cancel the tool I adopted?
It depends on the vendor's own payout terms to us. If a vendor claws back their referral fee after an early cancellation, that clawback flows through to your ledger too — we don't front cash we haven't actually received.