About SafeScan Now
We started SafeScan Now because the antivirus review industry had stopped reviewing antivirus. Most of the top-ranking comparison sites are owned by the companies they recommend, score on opaque formulas, and quote first-year promo prices that triple at renewal. This site is the simplest possible alternative.
Mission
Help readers buy the right antivirus — and avoid the wrong ones — using independent lab data, public scoring weights, and honest pricing. Nothing more, nothing less.
Story
SafeScan Now launched in 2026 after a private audit of the top 50 'best antivirus' sites found that 14 of them had undisclosed ownership relationships with the products they ranked first.
The founding editors had spent the previous decade inside vendor product teams, threat-intel labs, and a national privacy regulator. They wrote the first version of the scoring formula on a single page and put it on the site before publishing a single review.
Values
- Lab data over vendor decks
- If a claim isn't in an independent lab report or in an in-house test we can re-run, it doesn't go in the score.
- Renewal price over launch price
- Most antivirus reviewers quote the 70%-off first-year price. We quote the year-2 renewal because that's the price you actually pay.
- Conflicts in plain sight
- Affiliate links, ownership relationships, and methodology changes are disclosed inline on the page — not buried in a footer.
- Wrong is fine; hidden is not
- When we make a mistake, we log it on the page with a date and the editor responsible. Quiet edits are not allowed.
Editorial Team
Four full-time editors — security researchers, not freelance bloggers — write and review every page on SafeScan Now.