每个工具页底部那行「最后核对」到底说明了什么（附站内 376 条的日期分布）

The short version first: the date is a scope statement, not a warranty

Every tool page ends with a line like 'last verified 2026-08-29'. It does not promise that today is the same. It promises that the sentence was written, on that day, against the vendor's own site and pricing page. The gap between those two claims is the whole article.

1. What the dates in our catalog actually look like

The 376 published records only ever use three values for lastVerifiedAt: 369 records on 2026-08-29, four on 2026-09-14, three on 2026-09-15. So the fact that 369 records share one date is not evidence of three years of neglect — the opposite happened. We did one full pass, almost everything was written that day, and since then only a handful of records were re-checked because their content changed. You can count it yourself by loading the same module the site uses (src/lib/tools, published count 376) with npx tsx.

Why the distribution matters. Judging a directory by whether it has dates is useless; judge it by how the dates are spread. 300 different dates means maintenance is incremental, and stale entries hide behind fresh ones. All dates in one day — our case — means there was a census, and everything after census day is unknown to us. That is a sentence the site should say out loud rather than let readers discover.

2. What the date proves, and what it cannot

What it proves:

• the line was not copied from a slogan. What we store in pricing.detail.zh is the vendor's own wording from that day, for example 'Free / Plus $20/mo / Pro $200/mo'.
• we wrote it in a falsifiable form: anyone who opens the pricing page the same day can check it, and can call it wrong if it is.

What it cannot prove:

• that it is still true today. Vendors redesign, raise prices, turn a free tier into a trial; they do not notify directories.
• that our whole picture of the product is current. The fields that decay fastest are price and free-tier limits; the slowest are structural facts: openSource is true for 37 records and hasApi for 53, and those move a few times a year. Quotas are the other end of the spectrum: 287 records mention 免费 or free, 211 of them also carry an amount in the same line, yet pricing.detail.zh has a median length of 16 characters (longest 96), and 76 of those 287 contain no digit at all. So what follows 'free' is usually a status, not a quota.

3. The alarm we installed for ourselves

npm run validate:tools prints a freshness line every run: how many records, the oldest one, how many days ago. The rule is a 180-day window with a 30-day advance warning, and it is deliberately non-blocking — make 'stale data' a hard build failure and someone eventually raises the threshold to unblock the pipeline, which is self-deception. The same check now also sits in GitHub Actions: a weekly content audit (.github/workflows/content-audit.yml) runs data freshness, search-index drift and AdSense readiness, and writes the result into the run summary.

Extrapolating from the current spread, the 369-record batch starts tripping that alarm around February 2027. We are printing our own timer here precisely so that it can be pointed at.

4. A 30-second self-check (no need to trust us)

1. Read the date, then the gap. You are not buying 'this tool', you are buying 'this tool at today's price and quota'. The older the check, the more you re-read.
2. Open the vendor changelog. A product with no public changelog has the least durable feature promises — that predicts whether a directory page drifts better than the date itself.
3. Verify only the field you are about to rely on. Signing an annual plan means price and refund terms; building on the API means hasApi and quotas. Checking the whole page is an illusion; checking one field is finishable.

5. What this practice cannot do (stated plainly)

• We keep no historical snapshots. Only 'the value we copied' plus 'the day we copied it', so we cannot prove 'this record has already changed' — we can only mark which day it reflects.
• We do not run scrapers. Scraping turns vendor blogs and third-party reviews into sources of fact, and those are written to sell. That is why a full pass is manual, and why the dates cluster.
• The date is not a score. 'A fresh date' does not mean 'a good product'. It answers how new the sentence is, not whether it is correct.

One-sentence summary

A verification date describes the scope of a claim, not its guarantee; structural facts age slowly, prices and quotas may not survive a day. When reading any directory — ours included — find that date first, then decide which fields you still need to re-check.