Write for Us

We Work With a Small Pool of Contributors

Honest Ratings is a small, independent team, and we occasionally bring on freelance contributors to help cover our ten categories — wireless earbuds, mechanical keyboards, gaming mice, portable monitors, power banks, USB-C hubs, smartwatches, webcams, portable power stations, and wall chargers — in more depth than our core team can manage alone. If you have genuine hands-on experience with consumer tech and can write clearly about it, we'd like to hear from you.

What We're Looking For

We publish comparison articles, evergreen buying guides, and deep-dive reviews within our existing categories. We're particularly interested in pitches that come from real ownership or testing experience — a keyboard enthusiast who has used a dozen switch types, someone who has actually lived with a specific smartwatch for months, a reader who travels constantly and has strong opinions on power banks. Purely spec-summary articles with no hands-on component are not a good fit for this Site.

Tone and Style

Write the way you'd explain a purchase decision to a friend who trusts your judgment: specific, direct, and willing to say when something isn't worth buying. We avoid clickbait headlines, filler introductions that restate the title in different words, and vague superlatives like "amazing" or "game-changing" without evidence behind them. Every claim about performance should be something you actually observed, not something copied from a spec sheet or another article.

How to Pitch

Email amirchandler7@gmail.com with the subject line "Pitch: [proposed topic]" and include a 150–200 word pitch describing the angle, why it's useful to readers right now, and your relevant hands-on experience with the product or products involved. Include two writing samples — published work if you have it, or a short original sample if you're new to freelance writing. We read every pitch, though response time varies with volume.

Compensation

Compensation is negotiated per piece, based on length, the depth of testing or research required, and your experience level — we don't publish a fixed flat rate here because a 600-word update to an existing guide and a 2,000-word original deep-dive with new hands-on testing are genuinely different amounts of work. We'll discuss and agree on payment terms before you start writing, not after.

Bylines and Author Pages

Accepted contributors receive a named byline and a short author bio linked from every article they write, which you can use to link to your own site or portfolio. We believe named accountability makes for better, more trustworthy writing, and we don't publish anonymous or generic "staff" bylines for contributed work.

How We Handle AI-Assisted Drafts

We're not opposed to using AI tools as part of a writing process — for outlining, checking grammar, or organizing research notes, for instance. What we require is transparency and verification: if part of your draft was AI-assisted, tell us when you submit it, and every factual claim, specification, and performance observation must be personally fact-checked by you against the actual product, not accepted as generated. We do not accept fully AI-generated submissions presented as original hands-on writing — that's a fast way to lose a byline on this Site permanently, and it undermines the entire premise of independent testing.

Rights and Editing

Accepted pieces are published exclusively on Honest Ratings, so please don't submit work already published elsewhere, or republish it after we run it, without checking with us first. We reserve editorial discretion to edit for clarity, length, and house style, and we'll share substantive edits with you before publishing.

Turnaround and Deadlines

Once a pitch is accepted, we'll agree on a delivery date together rather than impose a fixed deadline unilaterally — timelines vary depending on whether the piece requires you to spend real time with a product before writing. If something comes up and you're going to miss an agreed date, tell us as early as possible; a heads-up two days before a deadline is far more useful to us than silence followed by a missed one.

Get in Touch

Ready to pitch? Email amirchandler7@gmail.com.