About The Touchstone Report
The Touchstone Report is an independent publication that scores companies in the gold, jewelry, valuation, and inheritance industries against a single published methodology. We score what is verifiable. We publish the math. We update quarterly.
Our mission
The "best of" pages that dominate search results for queries like best cash for gold or best estate planning software are, in most cases, unaccountable. The ranking criteria are not published. The relationships between the ranker and the ranked are not disclosed. The methodology, if one exists, is not portable — readers cannot recompute the score themselves or re-weight the criteria for their own situation.
That gap is what The Touchstone Report exists to close. We publish a scoring methodology before we publish any scores. Every entity in our index is graded against the same eight dimensions, weighted for the category the entity competes in. The dimension scores are published in full so any reader can recompute the total. Disagreements with the math are welcome — we will publish them.
The standard we hold ourselves to: a score should be portable, replicable, and falsifiable. If a reader thinks we got a dimension wrong, the evidence to argue is on the page.
Who runs The Touchstone Report
The Touchstone Report is editorially independent. The publication is funded by Heirfolio, Inc., and was launched in May 2026 with seed funding from Heirfolio's operating budget. We disclose this on every page that contains an affiliate link to Heirfolio, in the affiliate disclosure, and again here.
Funder
Michael Tanguma, founder and CEO of Heirfolio, Inc., funded the launch of The Touchstone Report. Tanguma's relationship to the publication is financial only. He has no editorial role and does not see scores or articles before publication. Under the editorial firewall described in our editorial policy, Heirfolio's leadership cannot review or revise content prior to publication, including content that scores Heirfolio itself.
The same firewall applies to Heirfolio's leadership commenting on competitor scores. The Touchstone Report does not accept editorial input from Heirfolio about Vigil Protocol, Trust & Will, or any other entity in our index.
Editorial team
The Touchstone Report is led by an editor-in-chief who reports to the editorial board, not to the funder. The editorial board is comprised of three members, two of whom must be independent of any rated entity at all times. Editorial board members serve two-year terms.
Current team (May 2026):
- Editor-in-chief: [TBD — search active]
- Lead methodologist: [TBD — search active]
- Editorial board chair: [TBD — search active]
- Editorial board (independent): [TBD — search active]
We publish the names of every team member as positions are filled. Bylines on entity profiles and reports identify the responsible editor for each piece. Where a piece is drafted by an editor whose prior employment includes a rated entity, that relationship is disclosed in the byline.
Why this matters
Funding a publication that scores you is unusual. The model only works if the editorial firewall is real. We have written the firewall into the editorial policy in operational detail: who can edit what, what triggers a conflict-of-interest recusal, how corrections work, what happens if the funder attempts to influence a score. Readers should hold us to it. If we appear to be drifting, the corrections inbox is open.
How we make decisions
What we score
We score companies in four categories: cash-for-gold buyers, investment-grade jewelry sellers, estate/inheritance planning platforms, and jewelry valuation tools. The categories are defined in the methodology. An entity can appear in multiple categories with separate scores; multi-category scores are not combined into a single overall.
We pick entities to score using three signals:
- Search volume — entities that show up when readers are actually looking for something. If a brand owns the "cash for gold" SERP, it gets scored regardless of size.
- Industry footprint — entities that touch a meaningful share of category transactions, even if their search presence is small.
- Reader requests — entities readers email us asking about. Send tips to editorial@touchstonereport.com.
We score the entity our readers would reasonably encounter — the marketing-site experience, the published policies, the publicly verifiable trust signals, the actual mail-in or onboarding flow. We do not score things readers cannot see.
What we will not score
- Private offerings where the relevant terms are not publicly disclosed
- One-off pop-ups, paid promotional events, or referral-only flows that lack a stable public surface
- Entities where the staff are anonymous and no executive team is identifiable
When an entity fails these basic public-surface tests, we publish a short note explaining why we did not score it.
When we change our minds
Material events — acquisitions, breaches, leadership changes, policy changes — trigger immediate re-scores. When a re-score is materially different from the prior score (more than 5 points), the change and the reason are noted in the entity profile and the previous score is archived under the same methodology version label.
When a sub-criterion is challenged on factual grounds and the challenge is supported by new evidence, we update the score and publish the correction.
How to submit a tip or correction
Corrections
If you find a factual error on the site — a misstated price, a mis-cited document, an outdated metric — please email corrections@touchstonereport.com with the URL, the specific claim, and a link to the corrected source. We aim to publish corrections within seven days of verification. The original is archived (not deleted) with a strikethrough and a link to the correction.
If a correction materially changes a score, the recomputed score is published alongside the correction with a note explaining which dimension changed by how much.
Tips
If you have a tip about an entity in our index — a complaint pattern, a regulatory action, a policy change, a leadership transition — please email editorial@touchstonereport.com. We treat tips on background by default. If you want to be quoted on the record, please say so explicitly.
Tipsters who are current or former employees of rated entities are protected to the extent we can protect them. We will not publish identifying details without explicit permission. We will not respond to legal requests for source identity except where compelled by a court of competent jurisdiction.
Pitches
We commission longer-form work from outside writers when the topic warrants depth we cannot produce in-house. Pitch ideas to editorial@touchstonereport.com with a one-paragraph summary, a sentence on why you are the right person to write it, and one example of prior work. We respond within two weeks.
Contact
| Purpose | Address |
|---|---|
| Corrections | corrections@touchstonereport.com |
| Editorial tips, pitches, story ideas | editorial@touchstonereport.com |
| Press inquiries | press@touchstonereport.com |
| Newsletter, subscription, technical | hello@touchstonereport.com |
| Legal, formal correspondence | legal@touchstonereport.com |
The publication does not have a physical office for visitors. Postal mail can be sent to the registered office on file; readers who need that address should email legal@touchstonereport.com first so we can confirm the relevant entity.
A note on conflicts
The Touchstone Report is funded by an entity we score. That is the largest conflict in the operation and we treat it as such. The full set of mitigations — the editorial firewall, the published methodology, the dimension-by-dimension scoring math, the 30-day pre-publication notice, the verbatim company-response policy, the corrections cadence — is documented in the editorial policy. Readers should evaluate the publication on whether those mitigations actually work in practice, not on whether the conflict exists.
If you observe the firewall failing — a score that appears to be influenced by the funder's commercial interests, a competitor scored unfairly, a correction we should have made and did not — please write to corrections@touchstonereport.com or to the editorial board chair when that position is filled.
Subject to the next quarterly review.
Last updated May 25, 2026.