Path Proof

A pros-and-cons list has one flaw: it treats "I read a great review" and "the seller told me it's waterproof" as the same weight. They aren't. One is a fact you can point to, the other is a claim nobody's checked yet. Path Proof keeps them apart, all the way to the choice.

It's built for the decisions that actually cost you if you get them wrong — a laptop, a contractor, a course, a move, a big piece of furniture. You start by writing down what you're deciding and what a good result looks like. Then the constraints that aren't negotiable: a price ceiling, a warranty you must have. Anything that breaks one of those gets marked disqualified on its own, no matter how good it looks elsewhere.

Next you set the criteria that matter and how much each one weighs, and they have to add up to a hundred before you can compare — no fudging it. Add your options, and each one gets a blank row for every criterion, so nothing quietly goes unscored.

Here's the part most tools skip. When you rate an option on a criterion, the rating doesn't count as solid until you've written why or attached something that backs it up. Evidence lives in its own inbox — a link, a photo, a spec sheet, a quote from the seller, a note to yourself — and you say plainly whether each piece supports a rating, contradicts it, or is just context. A link that won't open is saved anyway and marked "source not checked," because the app isn't going to claim it verified something it didn't.

Claims get their own screen. Every promise the seller made, every assumption you're carrying, sits there as unverified until you decide otherwise. Anything still unproven when you go to choose shows up in Open Questions, next to the criteria with no score and the options with no price. If you want to proceed with a gap, fine, but you have to write down why you're comfortable.

Then you compare. The matrix shows value, rating, confidence, and whether there's evidence behind each cell, and an option that fails a must-have can't quietly top the table on points. The scenario lab lets you ask what happens if the budget drops or speed suddenly matters most, and it tells you exactly why the leader changed. Risks get a board of their own, and a high-impact, high-likelihood one won't let you past without either a plan or a written "accepting this anyway."

You record the final choice with your reasons, the trade-offs you accepted, and how sure you are, and that freezes a snapshot of everything as it stood. Then it sets a date to come back.

That last part is the point. Weeks or months later, it asks how it actually went — did the budget hold, did the risk you shrugged off show up, would you choose it again. Do that a few times and it starts showing you your own patterns: where you overrate price, where you underrate time, which sources kept letting you down.