onethiefsurplus review for Negate ‑ Bot Protection

*Edited 4-10-24* I came back to see what their reply to my review would be and I see that they state that I threatened them with a negative review for free services. Unfortunately for them, I can prove that is false. All communications are directly copied and pasted from the email chain with no exclusions, and I will be happy to provide all of that upon request. I also never requested anything other than information from them on how they got their metrics and how they came to the advertised amount of money saved. The claim that I threatened a bad review for free services is unequivocally false and I would highly encourage them to post their proof of this as I have posted the entirety of the communication between us except for the trouble ticket info as I do not possess that. This negative review was left prior to them ever contacting us and in fact is likely what prompted them to actually contact us on March 19th within an hour of our negative review being posted since all other forms of communication received no response. I attempted every form of contact provided and waited about 11 days for any reply before sending the final email and leaving this review a few moments afterwards. *INITIAL REVIEW* Beware. This app counts/ charges you for everything that interacts with every page on your site and you will get charged for every page a bot visits even though your settings are to bounce the bots from your site. I had been noticing troubling spikes in traffic (more than a thousand in an hour) once per day for a week or more prior to installing this app and it seems to have solved that somewhat but there is no clear way of even telling this for sure since they are so obtuse with their information. By their own admission their estimates of money saved are not accurate. I had high hopes for this app but after hitting the "API limit" in about a week of having it and them forcing a financial upgrade to continue having protection, doubling or even tripling the monthly cost, not replying to emails asking for clarification, and taking days to even reply to the help ticket I submitted I have given up and will be uninstalling the app upon submission of this review. Their reply to my initial help ticket. MARCH 8TH Thank you for contacting us. An API request is counted every time we score a user or bot, this can happen multiple times if a user visits several pages on the website as the score might change due to their behavior. Depending on the plan you are on, you have a specific amount of API requests per month and whenever you get close to exceeding it we notify you that the protection will be paused when the API limit is reached. The amount of money saved number is an estimate based on the events that we blocked on the different pixels. The numbers we use for events such as AddToCart or Checkout are averages sp they might not correctly reflect your store and could be very different from the actual numbers. We try to provide an estimate but it's difficult to account for specific kind of stores. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any more questions. My reply that went unanswered for more than 11 days. Sent on March 8th Good afternoon, I'm asking because I'm trying to assess the value your app is providing and you haven't really said anything that will help me make that decision. Correct me if I'm wrong but basically you just told me that the money that you are supposedly saving me is estimated from pixel data (and I don't have any of those connected to my store). Since I don't have any active pixels attached to my store, how is your app coming up with this data? And I can get charged multiple times for the same bot/ human in the site if they decide to visit multiple pages on my site. Can you sell me on your app before I remove it from my store? My next reply sent March 19th immediately prior to posting this review after no further communication from them. "I guess that my business is not important enough to you to reply to my previous email. Noted. My review and removal of your app will be the solution then." AFTER MY REVIEW WAS POSTED HERE, THIS IS THEIR EMAIL REPLY. Hi (name redacted), I am sorry if we haven't fully answered your questions. I will provide more details on the previous answer, all ad-related events (AddToCart, Checkout, FormSubmission, etc) are collected by our own pixel. We use this number to create an estimate on the amount of money that is saved, this data is generic and therefore might not be accurate for your store. If you'd like, we can also personalize this information by using CPM costs provided by you. Negate specializes in blocking bots from firing your marketing pixels and analytics, this is done independently from any kind of pixel you might be using on your website. We do not track what ad platforms or pixels you have installed on your website therefore we do not use such data to create the estimates. Kind Regards, Negate Support Team