How Scoring Works

Built on signals, not opinion

SaaS Royale doesn't grade you on taste. Every number on every card comes from public data we can see for ourselves: your landing page, your domain, performance probes, and a small set of independent sources (Google PageSpeed, DNS, Product Hunt, GitHub, Safe Browsing).

We read the signals. The formulas turn them into six stats. No human picks the numbers, nobody pays to be ranked higher, and re-scrapes are scheduled, not on demand. Below: every input that shapes your card, by stat. The exact weights, thresholds, and the “fix-this-first” recommendations live inside the Intelligence Report. The categories don't.

What we read

• Domain age and registration history
• SSL certificate health
• DNS configuration (MX, SPF, DMARC)
• Independent social proof on your page
• Open-source presence, where applicable

Why it matters

Founders trust SaaS that look like they've been around. Power is the closest proxy we have to that gut feeling. It's also the closest a fresh card has to a punch.

What we read

• Mobile and desktop performance scores from Google PageSpeed
• Time to first byte, measured from our edge
• Core Web Vitals reported by Lighthouse
• Whether your viewport is configured for mobile

Why it matters

Speed is the only stat your visitors feel before they read a single word. We treat it the same way they do.

What we read

• Reading ease of your homepage copy
• Presence and count of calls to action
• Headline and meta description quality
• Open Graph tags (the preview when your link is shared)
• Favicon resolution and visual polish

Why it matters

A SaaS that needs explaining doesn't sell itself. Clarity rewards founders who already did the editing work.

What we read

• Social proof signals on your landing page
• Product Hunt presence and reception
• GitHub stars, if open-source or hybrid

Why it matters

A score for traction, not for being live. Presence rewards SaaS that exist outside their own homepage.

What we read

• Uptime sampled across our ping cadence
• SSL certificate validity and remaining lifetime
• Server stability under repeated probes

Why it matters

Cool features die when the server dies. Endurance is the boring stat that quietly separates real businesses from weekend launches.

What we read

• Score deltas across recent re-scrapes
• Direction and magnitude of week-over-week change

Why it matters

One stat that won't sit still. A card improving week-over-week deserves to look like one. A card slipping deserves to feel it.

What this score isn't

• Not pay-to-win. Crowned unlocks intelligence about your card. It doesn't move the score itself, and never will.
• Not manually curated. We don't hand-rank, demote, blacklist, or boost. The scoring engine runs the same formulas on every URL, every time.
• Not a verdict. Stats are an entertainment-grade benchmark, not a quality certification. Don't make investment decisions on a card.
• Not gated by ownership. Anyone can submit any public URL. Claiming a SaaS is a verification step, not a leveling-up step. It adds the verified badge and transfers control of the card.

How the arena stays honest

• Momentum smooths week-over-week noise. A bad day doesn't tank you. A bad month does.
• Scores re-compute on a schedule, not on demand. Ship something on Monday, watch your card move by the following week.
• Ties are real. Two cards can earn the exact same total honestly, and then it's the battle that decides who climbs.
• Every stat is on the same 0–100 scale, so a Power of 60 and a Speed of 60 mean the same thing about how you stack up: middle of the pack on that signal.

Want the receipts?

The page above tells you what we read. The Intelligence Report (included with Crowned) tells you how much each sub-signal cost you, ranked by impact, with the specific fix for each one. It's the version of this manual where the formulas are visible and the advice is personal.

If you're not signed up yet, the fastest path is getting your card first. It's free, and the rest of the arena unlocks from there.