About

I am Jacob Sheldon. I run Median, an accounting firm for startups, which means I spend most of my week inside other founders’ books. You see what companies actually pay for software, as opposed to what they say they pay, and you see which subscriptions are still billing eighteen months after anyone last logged in.

This site started because I kept writing the same email. Someone would ask what to use for payroll or banking or books, I would send four links and a caveat, and a month later I would send almost the same thing to someone else.

How tools get picked

A tool is here because I have used it, because a company I work with uses it, or because it is the obvious option in a category and leaving it out would be strange. Prices come from the vendor’s own pricing page, and every price carries the date I checked it. I re-check on a 90 day loop, because a stale price is worse than no price.

Where a tool is wrong for someone, the write-up says so. A directory that likes everything is not useful to anybody.

How these posts are made

Worth being straight about, since it is the question everyone has about anything published in 2026. I use AI tooling to draft and edit, in the same way I use a spellchecker and a spreadsheet. What it does not do is decide anything.

The prices are pulled by hand from vendor pages and dated. The screenshots are mine, taken inside accounts I pay for. The cost models are built on assumptions I chose, and the assumptions are published next to the numbers so you can disagree with them. The verdicts, including every “do not buy this if” line, are my opinion with my name on it.

If you remove the first-party parts of a post here, the post stops making its argument. That is the test I hold it to.