How SaunaIndex ranks companies

How does SaunaIndex rank companies?

Each company gets one number out of 100, built from three pillars that are added together. The score is deterministic, meaning the same data always produces the same rank, and the tables below are generated from the same constants the ranking itself uses, so this page cannot quietly fall out of step with it. The same formula runs on every category, so a showroom and a builder are scored the same way and never compared to each other: each category hub ranks only the companies inside it.

What is each pillar worth, and what is in it?

Why these three weights and not the ones another directory would pick. Reviews carry the most because a customer's account is the only part of this that does not come from the seller. What a company states about itself carries the LEAST, at 25, because this directory mixes sauna shops, heater manufacturers, kit suppliers and installers: only a handful of these companies publish a licence or insurance sentence at all, and the largest sauna retailers publish none, not because they are hiding anything but because a shop selling a self-assembly cedar kit is not making a trade-licence claim. Weighting that pillar higher would rank general renovation contractors above specialist sauna companies for answering a question a sauna buyer is not asking. Inside that pillar, the brands a shop says it stocks are worth exactly as much as licence sentences, so a retailer and an installer have the same route in.

What is an adjusted rating?

A raw star rating is misleading when the review count is tiny. SaunaIndex fixes this by blending each company's rating with the dataset average, treating every company as if it started with 10 imaginary reviews at the mean of 4.65stars. A company with hundreds of reviews barely moves, while a 5.0 built on four reviews is pulled toward the average until it earns more history. This matters more here than in most trades: a sauna is bought once, so plenty of good companies carry very few reviews. It is the same shrinkage approach behind IMDb's Top 250.

What does “the website answered” mean, exactly?

Each company's web address was fetched once, on 2026-08-31, and the result is worth points in the third pillar. What that fetch can and cannot prove is a decision this site has taken deliberately, because getting it wrong publishes a false statement about a trading business. A bot block, a robots.txt refusal, a browser-challenge stub and a timeout are NOT treated as evidence a site is gone: a person with a browser is very likely served the page normally. What is treated as gone is a domain that does not answer at all, or one that answers perfectly well with somebody else's business, because a lapsed domain gets rebought.

No company is removed, hidden or filtered out of a list because of any of this. Being unreachable from a data centre is not evidence a business has closed, and a company with a lapsed domain is a company with a lapsed domain. It ranks lower and it still ranks.

Where does the middle pillar come from, and what is it worth?

Each company's own website was read once and every finding was stored with the exact sentence it came from. 39 of the 39 listings carry a record from that pass. If a sentence could not be found, no point is awarded and nothing is printed: there is no inference and no plausible guess anywhere in this pillar.

Read the wording carefully, because it is the whole claim. This site prints “Says it is licensed”. It never prints “Licensed”, and it never prints “Verified”. A company wrote those words about itself and a crawler read them. Nobody rang the Electrical Safety Authority, nobody asked for a certificate of insurance, and nobody visited a single one of these businesses. Two filters run before any of it scores: a sentence telling YOU to hire a licensed electrician is advice to a reader, not a claim by the company, and it earns nothing; and a heater brand named in a customer testimonial is not a dealership.

The themes in the third pillar come from the Google reviews already shown on each profile, matched against a fixed list of SaunaIndexthemes. Google is never crawled for them, a company with fewer than three stored reviews gets none, and each theme is printed with the reviewer's own sentence underneath it. Three of those themes report a complaint, and they are shown in place, in the reviewer's words, rather than being quietly dropped.

What does the score look like in practice?

This is not an invented company. It is whichever company currently sits first on this site, taken apart by the same function that put it there, so if the arithmetic below is wrong the ranking is wrong too. Today that is SONCE HOMES at 77 out of 100.

Which companies does SaunaIndex exclude or rank last?

SaunaIndex does not know which of these businesses have closed, and this page used to say it dropped them. The records behind this site were collected in August 2026 and the export carries no closed-or-open field, so nothing has ever been dropped for being closed; check the company's own Google record before you rely on it. It also excludes businesses that only sell sauna sessions, such as spas, bathhouses, gyms and hotels, because this directory is about hiring someone to build, install, service or sell you one. Companies with fewer than 3 reviews or a rating below 4.0 still get a profile page for completeness, and nothing pushes them to the bottom of a list or bars them from the top of one. Two things hold them down all the same: they earn little of the 45-point reviews pillar, and under 3 reviews this site reads no review themes at all, so a further 10 points of the record pillar are out of reach. They land wherever that leaves them.

Where does SaunaIndex's data come from?

SaunaIndex pulls ratings, review counts and business details from public Google Maps profiles, then reads each company's own website to work out what it actually does: whether it builds, installs, repairs or sells, and which of our 2 categories it belongs in. That last step is why a showroom is listed as a retailer rather than as an installer. Market pricing is researched separately and every figure cites a named Canadian source, so you can trace it. We do not scrape private data or buy reviews.

How often does SaunaIndex refresh its data?

The current SaunaIndex dataset is stamped August 2026. We refresh review data and re-run the ranking on a rolling basis so positions track current reputation, and every page shows a visible last-updated date. If a business is sold, closed or corrects its details, send us a correction request and we update the record between scheduled refreshes.

What are the limits of SaunaIndex's rankings?

A ranking is a starting point, not a guarantee. The reviews are Google's, not ours, so they carry Google's own biases. SaunaIndex does not check a company's WSIB coverage, liability insurance, electrical licensing or manufacturer accreditations, and a high rank does not vouch for any single job. This matters here because sauna work almost always involves electrical work, which in Ontario has to be done by a licensed electrician and inspected, and nothing on this site confirms that any listed company arranges it. Get written quotes, check insurance and licensing yourself, ask who is doing the electrical, and read recent reviews before you commit. SaunaIndex helps you build the shortlist; the due diligence is still yours.