How prices are checked

Where prices come from

Every price, seat limit and free-tier cap on this site is read from the vendor's own material: its pricing page first, then its help centre, documentation or licence file where the pricing page is silent. We do not take figures from resellers, review aggregators or other comparison sites.

Each figure carries the date it was read and links to the page it came from. Tool profiles list their sources at the side; comparisons link each product's pricing page in its heading.

Where a vendor shows different prices by region, we read the US-dollar price unless the page says otherwise, and we say which currency a figure is in. Prices are before tax.

What we leave out

If a price cannot be read at source, it is not published. That happens more than you might expect: some pricing pages refuse automated requests, some only show prices for another region, and some ask you to book a call. When that happens we name the product, say why it is missing, and add it when the price can be confirmed.

When a page prints a price without saying whether it is the annual or monthly rate, we report it as "billing period not stated" rather than assume. When a vendor runs an introductory offer for new customers, we use the list price and mention the offer.

How team-size costs are worked out

Seat-priced categories (CRM, project management, help desks, password managers, team chat, developer platforms and AI tools) are priced at the team size you choose, usually shown at 5, 10 and 25 seats. For each tool we take the cheapest hosted plan that allows that many people and work out the monthly total:

• Per-seat plans: the seat price times the team size, or times the plan's seat minimum if the team is smaller.
• Flat plans: the plan price, plus any extra seats the vendor sells past the included number.
• Plans with a seat cap drop out once the team is larger than the cap.
• Self-hosted editions are shown separately, because their cost is your server and your time rather than a licence.

Other categories are priced the way their vendors charge: by list size for email, by pageviews for analytics, by server for hosting. Their comparisons price them at the usage a small business typically has and say what that assumption is.

Checked and tested

Every tool profile carries an evidence label. "Checked against vendor documents" means the prices, limits and features were read from the vendor's published material and nothing more. "Tested" means we ran the product ourselves; a tested profile links to what we did and what we saw.

At launch every profile is "checked". We do not write as though we used a product we have only read about, and we will not add the "tested" label until there is evidence to link.

How lists are ordered

Category registers list tools in a fixed editorial order, not a ranking. Comparisons that recommend a tool for a situation say which situation, and why, in the text: the cheapest at ten seats, the only one with single sign-on below a certain price, the one you can host yourself.

We do not publish star ratings or scores. A score implies a measurement we have not made.

Vendors can pay us to evaluate their product. Payment never changes the order of a list, the wording of a verdict, or whether a weakness is published. The advertising page has the full terms.

Sources and citations

Comparisons carry at least one link to a primary source for roughly every 300 words, and every tool profile must cite a dated source. The build refuses to publish a page that falls short, so this is enforced rather than hoped for.

External links are marked nofollow. A link here is a citation, not an endorsement.

Keeping prices current

Software prices change often. A page's "Updated" date moves only when its content changes. After 120 days without a re-check, a page shows a notice telling you the figures may have moved.

Factual errors are corrected openly and logged on the corrections page.

Telling us we are wrong

If a price has changed or we misread a plan, write to editorial@stackfeature.com with the page and a link to the current figure. Vendors correcting their own price get the same treatment as anyone else: we check the public page and fix it, at no charge.