How We Test

Every review on this site is the product of the same process. This page sets out what that process is, what we check, and — just as importantly — what we don’t do, so you can weigh our recommendations for yourself.

I’m Adrian King, Chief Editor here. If something on this page doesn’t match what you find in a review, that’s a problem I want to hear about, and my email is at the bottom.

How we choose what to cover

We don’t cover everything, and nobody honestly can. The disposable market alone turns over more SKUs in a quarter than any site can work through in a year.

What gets a review is decided on two things: what people are actually searching for, and what’s actually available to buy from a reputable retailer at the time of writing. We track both. We don’t take payment for a review slot, and no brand has ever bought its way onto this site.

What we check on every product

Five things, in this order. They’re the same five for a $9 disposable and a $90 mod, because they’re the five that decide whether you’re still using a device in three weeks.

• Build quality. Materials, panel fit, button and switch feel, how the pod or tank seats, whether the finish survives being carried. Cheap is fine. Flimsy isn’t.
• Performance. How the draw behaves at the top and bottom of the battery, whether the coil ramps evenly, and whether the device does at the end of a pod what it did at the start.
• Battery life. Measured against realistic use rather than the number on the box, and read alongside charge time and port type — a 1,000mAh cell that charges in twenty minutes beats a 1,500mAh one that takes two hours.
• Flavor. Whether it holds up past the first day, and whether it goes flat or scorched as the coil ages. A first-day impression tells you very little.
• Leak resistance. In a pocket, in a bag, at altitude, and after the fourth refill rather than the first.

Alongside those, we look at what it costs to keep running. A cheap device with expensive proprietary pods is not a cheap device, and we care more about the twelve-month figure than the shelf price.

Where our assessments come from

Being straight with you about this matters more than sounding impressive.

Our judgments draw on three things: long personal experience of vaping and of this category, the published specifications and manufacturer data for the product, and the pattern of what owners report once a device has been on sale for a while. Where a device belongs to a family we already know well — a new pod in a range whose previous three we’ve used — we say so and we reason from it.

We do not run a laboratory. We don’t publish coil-resistance curves, puff-count measurements, aerosol analysis or independently verified battery-discharge figures, because we’re not equipped to produce them and we won’t dress up an estimate as a measurement. If you see a number on this site, it either came from the manufacturer, from a retailer, or from something we can point at. Where we’re inferring rather than measuring, we say “should” and “likely” and we mean it.

What we verify automatically, and continuously

Two things on this site are checked by machine rather than by hand, because machines are better at them and don’t get bored.

Prices. Every price shown is read directly from the retailer’s own product data and refreshed daily. Prices move constantly in this category, and a review with a twelve-month-old price on it is worse than a review with no price at all. Where a price moves sharply, the change is held for a person to look at before it goes live, because a sudden 40% drop is as often a feed error as a sale.

Comparisons. On our side-by-side comparison pages, the winner of each individual attribute is calculated from the recorded specifications, not chosen by whoever wrote the page. If two devices tie on a spec, the page says they tie. This is deliberate: it’s the one part of a comparison where it would be easiest to quietly favor whichever product pays better, so we took the decision out of human hands entirely.

What our ratings mean

Ratings are out of 10 and they’re editorial — a considered judgment, not a computed score. A 7 is a good product with something specific about it that we’d want you to know before buying. Below 5 means we think you can do better for the money.

A rating is always relative to price and to what the device is for. A disposable and a regulated mod are not scored on the same scale, and a 9 on a beginner pod kit does not mean it outperforms an 8 on an advanced device.

How we use AI

We use AI tooling in producing this site, and we’d rather say so plainly than have you work it out.

It’s used for drafting, for structuring, and for the repetitive checking that would otherwise not get done at all — reading specifications consistently across hundreds of products, watching prices, flagging where a page has gone stale. Editorial decisions are not made by it: what gets covered, what a product is worth, what the rating is, and what goes in the verdict are ours. Nothing on this site is published from a source we can’t stand behind, and the byline on a review is a person who is accountable for it.

We think that’s the honest position. AI is a tool that helps a small team cover a large category. It isn’t a substitute for knowing the subject, and we don’t pretend it is.

Where we’re limited

Worth stating plainly, because most methodology pages skip this part.

We can’t cover everything, and the gaps aren’t random — they skew toward products that are hard to buy in the UK and US, and toward brands that don’t distribute widely. Palate is subjective, and ours runs toward tobacco and simple fruit flavors; we correct for it where we can and we can’t pretend it isn’t there. And we get things wrong. Prices move, formulas get quietly reformulated, a coil batch turns out to be bad.

Corrections

If something here is out of date or simply wrong, tell us and we’ll check it. That isn’t a courtesy line — it’s genuinely how most of our corrections start. Substantive corrections are made to the page itself rather than quietly overwritten, and the page carries the date it was last updated.

Money

SmokeTastic earns affiliate commission on some of the links here, and we run some display advertising, which is clearly marked as advertising. That’s how the site pays for itself.

It changes nothing about the ranking. The cheapest genuinely good option gets recommended as the cheapest genuinely good option, whether or not there’s a commission attached. If a product is bad, we say so and lose the sale. Advertisers do not see reviews before publication and do not get editorial input — the full detail is in our editorial policy.

Questions

Email me at adrian@smoketastic.com. If you think a review is wrong, say which one and why — that’s the most useful message we get.