You asked for examples and three PDFs arrived
That’s the usual shape of it. Three pieces, no brief, no word count, no note about what the client refused to sign off.
The pack proves one thing. Somebody wrote something, and it got published.
What you’re buying is different. You’re buying the piece that hasn’t been written yet, for your product, under your legal review.
So the sample is evidence, and it needs reading like evidence. Here’s how we read one.
Start with the claims, not the prose
Prose quality is the part everyone argues about. The claims are the part you can check.
Here is the mechanism, and it is the reason to check claims first. A page written in marketese, meaning exaggeration, subjective claims and boasting in place of plain facts, makes the reader do two jobs at once. They have to work out what the page is saying, and at the same time decide whether to believe it. 2 jobs, 1 reader, and the second gets in the way of the first: a reader who is busy questioning “industry-leading” has stopped processing the sentence it sits in.
Cut the boasting and the reader has 1 job again. That is why a concise, scannable, objective page reads faster and gets more done, and it is also why the claims are the first thing to check in any sample: if they don’t hold up, the prose never gets a fair reading anyway.
That’s a claim about reading, not about orders. What a plain page does to your revenue we don’t know, and neither does anyone who hasn’t measured yours.
Two pages we opened this morning
Both sell manufacturing services. Both are live. Open them yourself and the difference takes about a minute to see.
Xometry’s machining page prices its promises in units. Tolerances on metals are held to five thousandths of an inch “in accordance with ISO 2768 unless otherwise specified”. Standard lead time is 3-7 business days. Minimum feature size is 0.020 inches.
Then there’s the sentence most suppliers never write. Surface treatments, the page says, will not be applied “unless you have paid for them and we have specifically acknowledged them”.
That line costs the seller something. It tells you what you don’t get, in the room where you’re deciding to buy.
Protolabs takes the other route on its machining page. The banner offers parts “as fast as 4 days”. The service menu on the same page offers them “as fast as 1 day”.
Neither claim is false. Both are floors with no distribution behind them, and the two numbers share one URL: 1 in the banner, the other in the site’s own services menu.
Six checks, ten minutes
Run these on any sample before you judge the writing.
A sentence that can be wrong. Find one claim a competitor could disprove. If every sentence is safe, you’re reading a brochure, and your buyer will read it the same way.
A unit and a date on every number. “Faster deployment” is a mood. “3-7 business days” is a commitment somebody has to keep.
Something ruled out. Scope, prerequisites, who it isn’t for. A page that fits everyone was written for nobody.
Quotes with an owner. Look for a named person and a checkable source behind each one. Our own rule on this sits in what to collect before a case study.
The logo swap. Paste a competitor’s name over the client’s. If nothing breaks, the writer never got past the category.
One next step. Described in the words of the thing itself, and only 1 of them.
Four fails out of six and the prose doesn’t matter. Two fails and you’re looking at a brief problem, not a writer problem, which is a different purchase decision.
What a sample can’t tell you, and what to ask instead
A published piece is a negotiated object. By the time you read it, it has been through the client’s legal team, a product manager who wanted a feature named, and a deadline.
So four questions do more work than four more samples.
Ask what the brief said. Ask what got cut and who cut it. Ask which parts the writer researched and which arrived from the client. Ask how many rounds it took.
An honest answer to the last one is often “two, and the second was about a claim we couldn’t source”. That’s the answer you want.
We publish our terms on the same principle. 1 revision round, returned as a written list of points, and factual errors corrected at no cost, outside the round. The detail is in our terms and the price is on the rates page.
Why our own examples look the way they do
Client work stays off public display unless the client agrees in writing, so our portfolio carries pieces we wrote for ourselves. Three of them: a procurement platform comparison, a logistics case study and a cold email sequence.
They’re published as full texts rather than screenshots, and the page says why: “so you can judge the writing rather than a thumbnail of it”.
Now turn the six checks on this post, because a piece about reading samples is itself a sample.
It names 2 suppliers and quotes their pages, so a sentence in it can be wrong. Numbers carry units, and the sources carry the date we read them. It rules things out: the mechanism above is about reading, not about orders placed, and it says so.
Where it’s weaker: we can’t show you the brief behind the portfolio pieces, because we wrote them. And the fourth check asks for named people in quotes, while this post quotes companies rather than people.
That’s the honest reading. 3 examples of our own writing, 2 pages anyone can open, and no claim here about revenue.
What we’d send you
Ask us for examples and you get three full pieces, the format each one was written for, and the constraint it was written under.
If your subject is closer to one of our published articles than to the portfolio, we’ll say so and send the article instead. We’d rather you saw the near miss than the flattering one.
Sources
- Xometry CNC machining. Tolerances, standard lead time, minimum feature size, and the line on surface treatments. Read 8 September 2026.
- Protolabs CNC machining. The two lead-time claims, both on that page on 8 September 2026.
- Our portfolio, rates and terms. Three full sample pieces, $149 per article, one revision round, factual corrections free of charge.
Send us the piece you’d hold a supplier to and the brief behind it. Our read on both comes back inside 1 working day, with a price if you want one.