Who writes Tray Count, and how
A small editorial desk, no dentist on the masthead, and a rule that a figure without a source and a date does not get printed.
Who writes this
Tray Count is written by the Tray Count editorial team. Nobody here is a dentist, an orthodontist or a dental nurse, and nothing on this site has been reviewed by one. We say so at the top of every page rather than burying it, because in a subject like this the reader's first question should be "who is telling me this, and what do they know?"
What we can do is read. Company pricing pages, regulator statements, press releases, court filings and attorney general settlements are all public, and a surprising amount of what circulates about clear aligners contradicts them.
How a figure gets onto a page
- It has to come from the organisation that would know: the seller for a price, the regulator for a rule, the company for its own closure.
- It is recorded in FACTS.md with the source URL and the date it was read.
- It is printed with that date beside it, because a price without a date is a memory.
- If two sources disagree and no primary source settles it, no number is printed at all. That rule costs us traffic on searches where readers want a single confident figure, and we would rather lose the traffic.
What we will not publish
No before-and-after photographs, whether clinical, stock or generated. No patient stories or testimonials. No success rates, satisfaction percentages or lifespan figures we cannot trace to a named, dated source. No "average cost of aligners" assembled from other people's estimates. No star ratings on treatments nobody here has undergone.
And no diagnosis. Tray Count will not tell you whether your bite needs correcting, whether your case is suitable for aligners, or which brand your mouth needs. Those are questions for someone who has examined you.
What pays for it
A small number of outbound links are paid. They are labelled where they appear, and the full list — including the brands we refuse to link at any price — is in the paid-links note. No payment has ever decided a placement here, for the simple reason that we rank nothing.
Corrections
If a price on this site is stale, a quotation is wrong or a source has moved, tell us and we will fix it and date the fix. Write to the desk.