How we verify RiseGuide reviews

Where the reviews come from

At each build we fetch the public review feeds for the RiseGuide app from three independent platforms:

• Apple App Store — RSS customer-review feed for the RiseGuide iOS app across the US, UK, Canadian and Australian storefronts.
• Google Play — public review listing for the Android app on the United States storefront.
• Trustpilot — public review feed when theTRUSTPILOT_API_KEYcredential is configured at build time.

Each platform returns its own review IDs, which we keep — so if you click through to the source, you land on the original review on that platform.

What gets filtered out

Reviews go through a three-layer content filter before they appear on this site. The filter is deterministic — same input, same result — and the code that runs it is in the public repo for inspection.

1. Billing & subscription complaints. Reviews that focus on charges, refunds, cancellation or consent are excluded from the displayed body of reviews — not because they don’t matter, but because they describe a support issue, not the product. For anything billing-related, contact RiseGuide directly at riseguide.com/contact-us.
2. Length floor. Bodies under seven words are dropped — too thin to evaluate.
3. Low-substance reviews.Pure adjective praise (“Amazing!”), “just started” tropes, and reviews with no concrete feature or outcome reference are excluded. We require at least one anchor — a named track, a product feature, an outcome, a comparison, or a specific critique.

From the most recent build, the filter retained 104 reviews out of 396 pulled from the three sources. The rejected 292 reviews are still in the audit log; nothing is silently dropped without a category.

How the aggregate rating is calculated

The headline rating you see at the top of the homepage — 4.5/5 from 34,970 reviews — is a count-weighted average of the public aggregate ratings on each source, not an average of the filtered reviews on this page. Specifically:

(4.40 × 18,439 + 4.61 × 13,691 + 4.31 × 2,840) / 34,970 ≈ 4.47

We display 4.5 — rounded to one decimal — so the figure stays comparable to how the individual platforms present their own averages.

Refresh cadence

The site is statically rebuilt and redeployed on every code change, and on demand. The build timestamp is exposed as a<meta name="build-time">tag in the page head — that’s when the review snapshot you’re reading was captured.

Independence

We don’t edit the text of reviews, we don’t hand-pick which reviews appear, and we don’t exclude one-star reviews unless they match the billing-complaint rules above (which apply equally to one and five star reviews). The filter logic is deterministic and open-source in the public repository — the rejected reviews are preserved in the audit log so the editorial trail can be reconstructed.

Editor & contact

Edited by RiseGuide Reviews Editorial. For corrections, takedown requests, or to flag a review that should have been filtered, email [email protected].

For billing, account or refund questions about the RiseGuide app itself, please contact RiseGuide support — we cannot resolve those from the editorial team.