Two companies, one test.
ProofVue
The problem
Sourcing runs on marketplaces paid per lead and per deal, so they cannot afford to tell you a supplier is a middleman. A buyer wires forty thousand dollars to a company they found on a search page, believing it makes the product. Often it does not.
What it refuses
It ends at selection. No messaging, no purchase orders, no payments, no escrow, no freight. The moment a tool takes a cut of the transaction it has a reason to want the deal to happen, and its verdict stops being worth reading.
Where it stands
Live. All six stages work as a projects system with organizations, clients and roles. Verification reports, design analysis and a quote comparison bench are shipped. Onboarding is next.
Trove
The problem
Nobody owns both ends. The big stores treat a book as a SKU and are paid by volume, so they cannot promise a shelf means anything. The reading apps bolted onto them are storage. Neither side can fix what the other one broke.
What it refuses
It is not an open upload pipe and it never becomes one. Nothing reaches the shelf that the uploader does not own, nothing unlawful, no unauthorized editions, no machine-written filler. That costs volume, and the volume is the point.
Where it stands
In build. The foundation and the reading experience are done, which is the part everything else depends on. The commercial spine is next: catalog, checkout, and the author payout ledger.
What comes next.
A third company is in build. We are not naming it here yet, because a name on a marketing page before there is a product to judge is exactly the kind of claim this site is built to avoid.
It had to pass the same test the first two did: a problem we understand from the inside, a market where the incumbent is careless because its business model rewards carelessness, and a product we would use ourselves whether or not anyone paid us for it. It will appear here when there is something to look at.