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The B4 Index

Rates technology categories across five criteria and sorts each into buy, build, bridge or beware, plus vendor profiles.

benroberts.ai ↗
At a glanceswept 2026-10-12

≈ 58visits/mo

Little sign of use · estimate, read 2026-10-12

For
Founders, consultants, teams and analysts deciding whether to build, buy or bridge a software category.
Price
From $49/mopricing page, read 2026-10-14 ↗
Activity
Actively maintainedsite updated 4 days ago
Company
Domain since 2026domain registered
AlternativesSet it up for my teamIs The B4 Index yours? Claim the card →
What people do with itread off benroberts.ai on 2026-10-14
  • compare build, buy and bridge options for a software category
  • check vendor pricing across software categories before buying
  • test whether a paid tool could be replaced by a cheaper one
The companyeach fact with its source · read 2026-10-14
  • Domain since2026domain registered
Your datawhat they publish, each line with its page · read 2026-10-13

“Those API calls serve your search; the providers I use don't train their models on this API traffic under their terms, and I don't use your queries to train models either.”

privacy policy ↗

These are The B4 Index's own statements, read from its pages. We did not audit them. A line that is missing was not found on the pages we read; it does not mean the practice is absent.

How a program reaches itfound, not claimed · read 2026-10-13
  • MCP serverai.benroberts/b4-indexverified in the MCP registry
  • Stateanswers, 5 toolschecked 2026-10-13
  • Address to connectb4-index.vercel.app/mcp

MCP server details →

Each line is something a program found when it went looking: the registry entry, the server's own answer, a spec that parses. A missing line means we did not find it, not that it does not exist.

Questions this page answers
  • What is The B4 Index?

    Rates technology categories across five criteria and sorts each into buy, build, bridge or beware, plus vendor profiles.

  • Who is The B4 Index for?

    Founders, consultants, teams and analysts deciding whether to build, buy or bridge a software category.

  • How much does The B4 Index cost?

    Paid plans start at $49/mo, per The B4 Index's pricing page on 2026-10-14.

  • Is The B4 Index free?

    No. Its pricing page showed no free plan on 2026-10-14.

  • Do people use The B4 Index?

    Little sign of use: ≈ 58 visits/mo · estimate, 2026-10.

  • Is The B4 Index still maintained?

    Actively maintained: site updated 4 days ago.

  • Does The B4 Index train AI on your data?

    Its privacy policy speaks for its AI providers rather than for The B4 Index itself (2026-10-13): “Those API calls serve your search; the providers I use don't train their models on this API traffic under their terms, and I don't use your queries to train models either.”

  • Does The B4 Index give refunds?

    In its own words (terms of service, 2026-10-13): “Pricing, billing terms, and plan features for paid offerings will be presented at purchase; fees are non-refundable except where required by law.”

Not quite it? Describe the job

beta

Five tools from the Atlas that fit it, each judged against what you wrote.

How we read a tool

No votes, no reviews, no vendor claims. Every week a crawler reads each tool's own site and a few public registries, and the words on the card are bands over what it read.

  • Use: visits to the site (estimated), installs from npm and PyPI, presence in Chrome's usage report.
  • Activity: the newest release on GitHub, npm or PyPI; the newest dated page on the site; open roles on a public jobs board.
  • Price: the vendor's own pricing page, read with the date. A figure is printed only when it is on that page.
  • The line and the use cases are written by us from the homepage, one tool at a time, and refused when they repeat the vendor's marketing.

How AI assistants read each site — the reading vendors ask us about — is on each tool's own visibility page.