A pricing page has one job in its layout, and it is to make you read one number. The record behind every figure on this site cannot hold one number, because 'what does it cost' has at least four answers, and vendors are not always careful about which of the four they are answering. Learning to tell them apart is most of the skill, and it transfers: once you can see the four in our record you can see them on any pricing page you open.
Mangools is the clearest example on the site, because it prints all four itself rather than making us derive any of them. Its entry plan is $30.5 a month if you pay by the month. It is $18.85 a month if you pay for a year up front. The year up front is $226.2. And the difference between the two ways of paying, across a year, is $139.8. Four figures, one plan, and only one of them is money that ever leaves your account in a single movement.
Those four live in separate fields for a reason, and the reason is that the second one is the figure most vendors put in the largest type. It reads like a monthly price, it is written per month, and you cannot pay it monthly. Mangools' table also loads in its annual state, so the number you see before touching anything is the discounted one. That is not sharp practice, it is simply the default, and it is the single most common way a price gets misread, by a person or by a scraper.
It caught us. The first automated read of that page put the annual rate into the monthly field, and the record briefly claimed that paying month to month was cheaper than paying for a year, which is not a thing any vendor sells. Two things combined to cause it: the page ships in its annual state, and the card builds each price out of three separate elements, the currency symbol, the whole part and the cents, each its own node. Read the card as plain text and you get the whole part without its cents, filed under the wrong billing basis. The fix was to read both states through a real browser, clicking the toggle, which is now how that vendor is captured.
What makes the corrected record trustworthy is not that a human checked it once. It is that its four fields confirm each other in both directions. Twelve months at the monthly rate is $366, which is exactly the struck-through figure the page prints beside its annual price. The annual total divided by twelve is exactly the per-month figure the annual state advertises. When the arithmetic closes like that, the read is sound; when it does not, something was captured in the wrong state. That check costs nothing and it is the one we would recommend to anybody comparing two vendors by hand.
It also lets us grade the vendor's own claim. Mangools' page description advertises annual savings of thirty-five per cent. The recorded figures give 38.2% on the entry plan, so for once the marketing understates the discount. That is worth saying because the direction of the error is unusual, and because we could only say it at all by holding the monthly and annual figures apart.
A field this record leaves empty is a finding, not a gap, and the empty ones carry as much information as the filled. On Sensei's pricing page the word 'monthly' does not appear once. On Jetpack's, the phrase 'billed monthly' appears zero times and 'billed yearly' three times, once per bundle. On Akismet's, zero and six. All three sell annual licences with the price expressed per month, so all three have no monthly field at all. Sensei Pro is $15 a month in the sense that its yearly licence is $179, and in no other sense. Our note on that record says why the field stays blank in the plainest terms available: filling it would publish an annual rate as a month-to-month price, which is the exact error one of the nightly gates exists to catch.
The most instructive thing in any of these records is a figure that was available, plausible, and probably correct, and that is not there. Jetpack publishes no annual total anywhere on its pricing page. Pressable's page, a sibling brand, values an included Jetpack Security licence at a yearly figure, and that figure squares with twelve times Jetpack's own standing rate of $19.95 a month. It would have filled the hole neatly and nobody would have noticed. It is not in the record, because it is Pressable's rounding of another company's price rather than a figure Jetpack publishes. A number that fits is not the same as a number that was read.
The same rule quietly disposes of most of what looks like pricing on a pricing page. Jetpack's card carries lines of the form 'save so much a month against buying these individually'. That is the vendor's arithmetic comparing its own bundle to its own separate products. It is a savings claim, not a price, and none of it is recorded as a plan figure. Nor is a total the vendor's own widget gets wrong: the monthly state of the Mangools table mislabels its yearly figure as a per-month one, which is nonsense on its face, and nonsense does not go in the record just because it was printed.
Where a page opens on a discount, both numbers go in and each is labelled. FreshBooks advertises every tier at ninety per cent off for the first three months, so its entry plan shows $2.3 where the standing price is $23. Jetpack Security is $9.95 a month for the first year against a standing $19.95, printed honestly beside a struck-through figure. In both cases the promotional rate is the one you would quote to a friend and the standing rate is the one to budget on. The duration matters as much as the size, and it can often be checked rather than taken on trust: FreshBooks' own saving figure for that plan is exactly three times the monthly gap between the two rates, which confirms the three months without a sentence anywhere saying so.
Then there is the unit, which is part of the price whether or not the card treats it that way. Akismet's Pro tier is not a figure but a slider, starting at $9.95 a month and stepping through four rungs priced per five hundred spam checks. Every rung is an exact multiple of the first, so there is no volume discount anywhere on it, and the number to budget on is your own comment and form volume rather than the headline. FreshBooks bills each extra team member separately on every tier, which makes the price on its card a one-person price. And FreshBooks' real ceiling is not money at all: it is billable clients, five on the entry plan and fifty on the next, which is what will actually move you up the ladder.
The last thing a record has to be able to do is say that we could not read something. FreshBooks' page carries a monthly and yearly switch advertising a further ten per cent off. We could not actuate it, so there is no yearly figure for FreshBooks anywhere on this site: not an inferred one, not a calculated one, not one borrowed from a review. Akismet's Personal tier asks you to name your price, with no figure and no floor printed, so it is recorded as a plan with no price rather than as a free plan, because the page does not say it can be zero. The standing rule is that every price state gets captured, monthly and annual and lifetime and every toggle in between, and that where a state cannot be reached the record says so instead of estimating it.
If you take one habit from this page, take the toggle. Find it before you read any number, click it both ways, and write down which state the page was in when it loaded. Nearly everything else follows: whether the big figure is a month you can buy, whether the yearly total is the vendor's arithmetic or yours, and whether the discount you are being shown has an end date attached to it.