Editorial Policy

500k.io exists to give solo founders a daily, opinionated, founder-to-founder log of what's actually working with AI to scale to $500K ARR. We don't aggregate, we don't summarize Twitter threads, and we don't ship "ultimate guides" written by people who've never shipped. Every article either reflects something we did, something a named founder we trust did, or a public source we cite directly.

There is no editorial board. Maxime is the sole editor and sole author. No advertiser, sponsor, affiliate program, or platform has approval over content before publication, and none ever will. When we make a recommendation that benefits us financially (an affiliate tool, our own course, our own newsletter), we say so inline and on /disclosure.

500k.io is operated as a property of The Kreators AI, the agency I co-founded. The agency's clients have no input on 500k.io editorial — different audience, different governance, different inboxes.

Every numerical claim on this site comes from one of three buckets:

• First-person experience. Numbers we measured ourselves — agency campaigns, this site's analytics, our newsletter, our Claude Code workflows. These are tagged with the period and the volume so you can size the reliability.
• Named founders we interviewed. When we cite a peer's number ("$500K solo with three employees"), we name them and link to a public artifact (a tweet, a podcast, a published case study). We don't invent attributed quotes.
• Public sources we link to. Anthropic docs, OpenAI cards, official Stripe pricing, Cloudflare changelogs, vendor pricing pages. If we can't find a primary source, we don't repeat the claim.

When a claim is uncertain or directional, we say so ("ballpark", "roughly", "based on n=12") instead of inventing precision. Reverse-engineered or estimated figures are flagged inline.

Newsletter sponsorships unlock at 3,000 confirmed subscribers. When they do, every sponsor placement is clearly labeled as sponsored and visually distinct from editorial. Sponsors do not influence the article they appear next to, do not get to review articles before send, and do not get topics blocked from coverage. We will turn down sponsors whose product we wouldn't recommend to a friend.

Direct sponsorships of articles ("paid post", "advertorial") are not on the menu and never will be. If you see a 500k.io article that reads like a paid post, that's a quality failure on our side — flag it.

We use affiliate links for tools we use ourselves and would recommend regardless of payout. The principle: we recommend tools we use, not tools that pay us. Every affiliate link is rendered with rel="sponsored" per FTC and Google Search Quality guidance.

When two tools compete and the lower-quality one pays a higher commission, we recommend the better tool and accept the lower payout. When we change our mind about a tool we previously recommended, we update the article with a strikethrough and a dated note (see /corrections). Full affiliate program list at /disclosure.

500k.io is a site about AI; we eat our own cooking. Claude Code is part of every article's lifecycle — research, draft, copy-edit, schema generation. We also use Cursor, ChatGPT, and other tools as the workflow demands. We do not ship pure AI-generated articles without human review. Every article is read end-to-end by Maxime before publication, and the automated quality gate (a Claude Opus auditor) blocks any draft scoring under 85.

When AI tooling materially changed an article (e.g. a draft was AI-generated then heavily human-edited), we don't pretend otherwise — but the editorial accountability is still 100% human. If we get something wrong, "the AI wrote it" is not a defense.

We update articles when the underlying tool, pricing, or claim changes — not when traffic dips. The dateModified field in the frontmatter is truthful: bumped only when the article body changes, not on every cron run. When an update is material (price change, new feature, deprecation), we add an inline note dated to the change.

Time-sensitive articles (weekly recap, news posts) carry an explicit publish date and may decay; we don't backdate or silently rewrite history.

For editorial questions, factual corrections, or policy clarifications, email max@thekreators.ai. For factual errors specifically, see our corrections policy.

For privacy / data questions: see privacy. For affiliate / sponsorship disclosures: see disclosure.