About Desk of One

Desk of One compares software for people who run a business by themselves. Not small teams. One person, doing all of it.

Almost every software review is written for a company with staff. Seat pricing, permissions, approval workflows, shared calendars — none of it applies when the receptionist, the practitioner and the accounts department are the same person. The advice that follows from those reviews is therefore aimed at someone who isn't you.

How the comparisons are made

Every comparison follows the same method, and it is deliberately narrow:

• Prices come from the vendor's own pricing page, and that page is linked so you can check the figure yourself in one click.
• Where a figure cannot be verified, we say so rather than repeat a number from another article. Several vendors serve different prices and terms depending on the country you browse from; where that made a figure unverifiable, the article says that explicitly instead of quoting one.
• The real cost is the subscription plus the payment fees. Most comparisons rank tools by monthly subscription alone, which for a one-person business is usually the smaller half of the bill. We show the arithmetic so you can run it on your own numbers.
• We do not claim to have used every tool. Where an article describes behaviour, it is describing what the vendor documents, not a personal anecdote dressed up as testing.

Who writes it

Desk of One is a one-person operation, which is also the reason for the subject matter. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or reviewed by any of the vendors covered.

How the site is funded

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the vendor may pay a commission, at no extra cost to you.

That arrangement is disclosed at the top of every article that contains such a link. It does not decide what appears in a comparison or how it is ranked: every tool is measured against the same criteria, including the ones that pay nothing and the ones that have no affiliate programme at all. Where a tool is the right answer for a particular situation, it is recommended for that situation regardless of whether it pays.

If a comparison ever reads as though a recommendation was bought, that is a failure of this site and worth telling us about.

Corrections

Software pricing changes, and pages get restructured. If a figure here is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected. Corrections are made in the article itself rather than quietly removed.