June Castellanos
Testing, pricing & privacy analyst
Austin, TX · Covering this space since 2023
Reads the terms of service so you do not have to. Counts the free messages, times the cancellation flow, and checks what the charge actually says on a bank statement.
Disclosure: we may earn a commission from links on this page. Sites labelled “Ours” are run by us. 18+ only.
2023
Testing this category since
40+
Accounts paid for
Money & privacy
Focus
Background
June Castellanos covers the parts of this category that nobody enjoys writing about: what a free tier really gives you, what happens on day eight of a seven-day trial, how many taps it takes to cancel, and what name shows up on the statement afterwards. She spent years in consumer-subscription QA before this, which is where the habit of screenshotting every checkout page came from.
Her numbers come from paid accounts, not press pages. When this site publishes a message cap, she hit it. When it publishes a cancellation flow, she went through it and then checked the following month’s statement to confirm the charge actually stopped. Where a limit could not be verified directly, the article says so rather than repeating a figure from another roundup — a rule she enforces on everyone else’s drafts too.
The other half of her remit is privacy: retention windows, whether chat logs feed training, what a platform’s deletion request actually removes, and how adult-sector payment processing changes what happens when a company goes under. She is the reason this site’s articles keep saying "check it yourself, and here is exactly where to look."
Areas covered
- Free-tier limits and paywall mechanics
- Pricing, credits and subscription economics
- Cancellation, refunds and billing descriptors
- Privacy policies, retention and data use
- Age-verification and adult-payments regulation
Track record
- Consumer-subscription QA background
- Tests every limit on a paid account, not a press page
- Verifies cancellations against the following statement
- Fact-checks numbers across the whole cluster