The number that matters more than the label
At a 114mph driver swing speed — comfortably into tour territory — Today's Golfer's own in-house robot recorded 163.8 mph of ball speed and 272.8 yards of carry from Seed's SD-02, against 163.6 mph and 271.9 yards from Vice's Pro Plus. That's a 0.2 mph and under-a-yard gap between a $33-a-dozen ball and a £42.99-a-dozen ball built for a completely different price point. At the slower, more typical amateur swing speeds tested in the same piece, the gaps between models opened up considerably — so this is a finding about fast swings specifically, not a blanket "all golf balls are the same" claim.
Verified Data
Source: Today's Golfer, in-house 2026 direct-to-consumer robot ball test.
Value balls aren't a compromise anymore
Direct-to-consumer brands have spent several years closing the construction gap with tour-tier balls from the major manufacturers — three- and four-piece urethane covers, similar cores, a fraction of the marketing budget. Kirkland Signature's V3.0 was one of eleven models in the same Today's Golfer test, tested alongside the full Seed and Vice ranges. The brand on the box predicts price far more reliably than it predicts performance.
This is the whole BallFIT argument, from a different angle
We built BallFIT on brand-agnostic logic: what suits your swing, not what's on the shelf with the biggest logo. Independent testing landing on the same conclusion — that price and performance don't track together nearly as tightly as the marketing suggests — isn't a surprise to us, but it's good, verifiable confirmation. The right ball for your game is a fitting question, not a budget question.