About this site

I'm Hochul Song, a software engineer based in Berlin, Germany. I've been writing software professionally for over a decade, and on the side I read a lot of product reviews before buying anything that costs more than a movie ticket. Most of them aren't useful — they're either lightly rewritten marketing copy, AI-generated lists of "top 10 best …", or rushed unboxings written by someone who has clearly never lived with the thing.

This site is my attempt to do the opposite.

How a review gets onto this site

1. I bought the product with my own money. No press samples, no review units, no PR loans. The purchase date and where I bought it is part of the public record on every review page (purchasedAt).
2. I used it for at least 30 days in normal daily life before writing anything. The number of days is also on every page (usedForDays). For things like headphones, kitchen tools, or anything I use weekly, it's usually much longer.
3. I took the photos myself. Every image on every review page was shot in my apartment in Berlin with my own camera or phone. There are no manufacturer renders, no Amazon stock images, no AI-generated pictures.
4. I wrote the words myself. Headlines, pros, cons, FAQ answers — all written by me. The site uses templates and structured data to keep the format consistent across reviews, but the content is never generated.

If any of those four things isn't true for a given product, that product doesn't get a review here.

What I won't do

• I won't recommend something I haven't used long enough to form a real opinion.
• I won't quote a price. Prices change every day on Amazon, and stale prices are worse than no price. Each review uses a stable range (e.g. "50–100 EUR") so you can size it up without me lying to you tomorrow.
• I won't write reviews on demand for brands. The product list is whatever I happen to be buying for my own life — kitchen, audio, cleaning, small home goods, occasional electronics.
• I won't write 5-star "this is the best ever" reviews. Real products have trade-offs. Every review has at least two honest cons.

How I make money from this

Some links on this site are affiliate links to Amazon. If you buy something after clicking one of them, Amazon pays me a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. That's it. No brand has ever paid me to write or change a review, and the affiliate relationship doesn't affect what I write — every review is written long before any affiliate link is added.

The full affiliate disclosure is on the disclosure page.

How to contact me

If something on a review is wrong, outdated, or you want to suggest a correction, email me at hochul@sanoi.com. I read every message and try to reply within a few days.

Thanks for reading.