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How we research pricing
Most comparison pages in this market are written by vendors about themselves, or assembled once from other articles and never checked again. Both problems produce the same result: prices that were true at some point and are not any more. Here is what we do instead.
Every price comes from the vendor, with a date
We read each vendor's own pricing page and record what it says, along with the date we read it. That date appears on every page. If a number here is stale, the date tells you how stale. We also quote the vendor's exact wording in a section on each page, so you can check our reading against theirs without leaving the site.
Right now we track 21 companies. 17 of them publish enough to compare properly. Last full pass: July 2026.
When a vendor hides its pricing, we say so
4 companies on our list publish no usable pricing at all. We do not fill that gap with estimates from third-party blogs, because when we checked those estimates against each other they disagreed by hundreds of dollars a month for the same product. A vendor who will not publish a price gets listed as exactly that.
What we count as a gotcha
Every vendor page has a section for the catch, and it is not a rhetorical device. Real examples from this pass: an entry plan advertised at $20 a month that answers no phone calls at all, a platform quoting $0.05 a minute when that figure covers only the platform's own margin and the model, voice and phone line are billed separately, and two established services that publish plan prices but no overage rate anywhere.
How affiliate links work here
Some outbound links to vendors are affiliate links, marked as such in the page code, and we may earn a commission if you sign up. That arrangement pays for the research. It does not decide the rankings, and it does not buy softer language: vendors we earn from get the same gotcha section as vendors we do not. Several of the products we recommend most often have no affiliate programme at all.
What we do not do
- We do not publish a price we could not find on the vendor's own site.
- We do not rank by commission.
- We do not run vendor-supplied copy as if it were our own testing.
- We do not leave a page up unchanged once we know the pricing has moved.