Ask HN: Your process for finding/evaluating vendors

When you encounter a new business problem, what is your process for evaluating low-to-no-touch vendor solutions to that problem within a reasonable timeframe? An example: a client has asked me to put a customer feedback widget onto each page of their site. It'd be simple for a company to offer embed code that does this perfectly. And indeed, doing a google search for "collect website feedback" produces dozens of promotional listicles hocking different company's wares. While I give full credit to these companies for SEO mastery, I have no confidence that they're market leaders, let alone the best solution for my purposes. How would you go about discovering the best solution to this problem? Some thoughts I've gone through: - Evaluating your stack's open source options - Reading several "The 8 Best Ways to ____" articles and looking for patterns - ProductHunt - Making a HN post about your specific question - Trying the first thing that comes up in Google results and proceeding to the second once it becomes clear that the first won't work.