Thonest Verified
How to know these numbers are real.
You have just seen a company’s figures on their own website. Anyone can type a number onto a page — here is why these ones are different, what each of them does and does not prove, and how to check them yourself.
The figures are read, not entered
Every measured figure on a Thonest page is read from an account the company connected, on a schedule, by us. Nobody at the company types one, and there is no field anywhere in the product where they could. A company connects one source to begin and can add the other later, so a page may carry revenue, reach, or both.
What a billing connection establishes
Thonest connects to the company’s payment processor — Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Dodo Payments, RevenueCat, Superwall, Creem or Lemon Squeezy — with a key that is read-only wherever the processor offers one, and reads their subscriptions. The monthly recurring revenue you see is computed from that, every time, under the published rules below.
What it proves is that the money is really in that account. What it does not prove is whose account it is: a billing connection says nothing about who owns the website the page is embedded on.
What a Google connection establishes
Analytics and Search Console are read with Google’s own read-only permissions, for a property the company chose. Visitor counts come from the Analytics property; impression counts for searches naming the company come from Search Console. Both are monthly totals — we never receive individual visitors or the search queries themselves.
Search Console is also the strongest ownership proof on the site, and not because we checked anything: Google will not grant access to a property unless it has already verified that the account controls that domain. So a Search Console connection means Google confirmed the site belongs to them.
What it does not establish is revenue, or quality of traffic. Visitors are counted, not judged — a spike from a launch and a spike from an ad campaign look the same here, and the page says which month, not why.
The founder writes the story, never the numbers
What a founder does add is context: the launch, the price change, the pivot. Those are their words, and they choose which ones appear. But every one of them arrives with the real figures from its own date attached — before, and 30, 90 and 180 days after — and those figures are measured, not supplied. A founder can decide what to talk about. They cannot decide what the numbers were.
Can they hide the bad parts?
They can choose which moments appear — the same way anyone chooses what goes on their own about page — and a company may keep its revenue amounts private while still publishing the percentages and the dates. What they cannot touch is the measured line underneath. Every month is there, including the flat ones and the ones that went down. So a founder decides what to talk about, and you can still see exactly what the business did.
Every company is counted the same way
The rules are published in advance and applied identically to everyone: which subscriptions count, how annual plans are spread, what happens to trials, discounts and tax. They are versioned, so they cannot be changed underneath a figure that has already been shown.
Anything added later says so
A founder can write about something that happened last March. The entry still gets March’s real numbers — and the page says plainly that it was added afterwards. An update written today can never be made to look like it was recorded at the time.
What Thonest does not claim
A timeline shows what the revenue did around a decision. It does not tell you the decision caused it — you are looking at a real business with a lot going on, and the judgement is yours. What you are getting is the actual trajectory, in figures you can rely on, instead of a number somebody chose to show you.
Run a business with recurring revenue?
Your proof is already sitting in your Google account and your billing. Connect either one — one is enough to start — and your own timeline builds itself. Nothing is public until you say so.