Guide — Method

Ten rules for reading any pricing page, from reading a few hundred of them

This site's guides have worked through pricing pages a category at a time — seats, credits, enrolments, monitors, conversations, subscribers, envelopes — and the same handful of mistakes keeps being possible. These are the rules that came out of it, each one earned from a page that would have misled a careful reader. They apply to any vendor in any category, including the ones we have not read.

**Find both figures and divide.** The single most productive check on any pricing page is to multiply the monthly price by twelve and compare it with the annual total. If they are equal there is no discount, whatever the page says — and we have found a vendor advertising a substantial saving beside an annual figure that was exactly twelve monthly payments, to the penny, on two separate tiers. If the page prints only one of the two figures, the discount cannot be verified at all, which is itself worth knowing before committing to a year.

**Establish the billing basis before comparing anything.** The figure in the largest type is frequently the annual rate expressed per month, not a price you can pay monthly. Many pages open already in their discounted state. Some sell no month at all — one vendor's pricing page does not contain the word 'monthly' even once. Comparing two tabs quickly is the reliable way to put one vendor's annual rate against another's monthly one without noticing.

**Normalise the unit, and then check the period.** A per-seat price is not a bill until you multiply by headcount; a per-credit price needs your consumption; a per-monitor price needs your endpoint count. And check what period each allowance is quoted in, because one ladder we read counts documents per month on its entry tier and per year above it — a jump that looks twentyfold and is really less than double once both are annual.

**Treat a claim and its arithmetic as two separate facts.** We have checked eight vendors' own discount claims against the figures printed beside them. Two were fabrications, two understated their own offers, three were accurate to a fraction of a point, and one honestly claimed nothing where nothing was due. The direction of error cannot be assumed, which means the claim is never a substitute for the division — and a vendor rounding against itself deserves the credit as much as one overstating deserves the scepticism.

**Ask what the smallest purchase is.** A low per-seat rate can carry a minimum that makes it the expensive option below a certain headcount, and on one ladder the tier named for individuals is dearer per seat than the team tier from three people onward. 'Starting at' means the published figure is a floor with no stated ceiling. And at least one product carries a required setup fee worth about half of everything you pay in the first year, which appears in no monthly comparison anywhere, including ours.

**Find the limit that will bind you, not the one advertised.** Free and paid tiers alike are capped on wildly different axes: storage while people are unlimited, a minimum interval between runs, seats, subscriber counts, the number of items and the length of each. The most generous plan on the dimension a vendor advertises is frequently the tightest on the dimension you would actually use, and one platform's deepest free tier removes the automations that are the reason to want it.

**Ask what happens at the ceiling.** Crossing a limit pauses the service at one vendor and adds a per-unit charge at another, and a third reserves the right to do either. One costs money and the other costs the thing you were trying to do. It is a genuine product difference, it is decided long before you reach it, and it is almost never part of a comparison.

**Read an absence as a finding, and notice which kind it is.** A quote-gated tier tells you where the self-serve product ends. A page you could not read tells you nothing about the vendor. A deliberate zero — one vendor states in words that it charges no monthly fee — is a price. Those are three different facts and they are frequently presented as one blank space.

**Be most careful where a page looks most complete.** The failures that mislead are the ones that render: a currency symbol with no figure after it, a plan card showing add-on prices but not plan prices, a volume selector pricing two of its nine rungs, a well-formed zero standing where a paid rate belongs. A page that publishes nothing sends you elsewhere; a page that publishes something wrong sends you to checkout.

**Finally, check that you are comparing alternatives at all.** A category groups products that do similar work and quietly implies they are substitutes. In one category we hold, the dearest vendor's cheapest plan costs about ten times the cheapest vendor's most expensive plan — the ladders never meet, and no buyer is choosing between them. Before trusting any ranking, look at the spread: a factor of two or three is a comparison, an order of magnitude is a directory.

A note on what we do with all this. Every price on this site resolves from a dated reading of the vendor's own page at build time, in your edition's currency — SE Ranking's core tier is $129 a month as you are reading it, and a different figure in the other two editions, because the vendor sets a different price in each. We do not convert currencies, we do not take figures from other comparison sites, and where a vendor was read in one market only we withhold the page from the others rather than show you somebody else's prices. That means our coverage is patchier than it could be, and we would rather be patchy than plausible.

Divide before you believe

Monthly times twelve against the annual total. Equal means no discount however the badge is worded, and we have found exactly that beside a claim of a substantial saving. Only one figure published means the claim cannot be checked at all.

The big number is often the annual rate

Pages routinely open in their discounted state, and some vendors sell no month at all. The quickest way to compare wrongly is to read two tabs in whichever state each happened to load in.

Normalise the unit and the period

Per seat, per credit, per monitor, per conversation — and check whether allowances are quoted monthly or annually, because one ladder mixes both between its own rungs and turns a 1.67-fold increase into an apparent twentyfold one.

A claim is not its arithmetic

Of eight vendor discount claims checked against their own printed figures, two were fabrications, two understatements, three accurate and one an honest silence. No direction of error can be assumed, so the division is always worth doing.

The dangerous pages are the ones that render

Empty currency symbols, cards with some prices missing, selectors pricing a fraction of their rungs, and parseable zeros on paid tiers. A blank page sends you elsewhere; a wrong figure sends you to checkout.

Check that you are comparing alternatives

In one category the dearest vendor's entry plan costs ten times the cheapest vendor's top plan, so the ladders never overlap and no ranking of the two means anything. Look at a category's spread before trusting its order.

Questions people actually search

Which of these rules matters most?

Divide the annual total by the monthly price. It takes seconds, it applies to almost every subscription, and it has caught more misleading claims in our reading than every other check combined. If a page publishes only one of those two figures, treat any advertised saving as unverifiable rather than as a number.

Why do you keep saying a figure is 'ours' rather than the vendor's?

Because the distinction decides whether you can act on it. A per-month figure derived by dividing an annual total is a useful comparison number and not a rate you can pay; a converted currency figure is arithmetic on an exchange rate that moves daily. Our records mark derived figures as derived, and we publish no converted prices at all.

Why is your coverage incomplete?

Partly because we have not read every page yet, and partly because we refuse several shortcuts that would fill the gaps. We do not convert prices between currencies, take figures from other comparison sites, or publish a page in an edition whose figures we cannot resolve. The result is fewer comparisons than we could otherwise show, each of which contains prices you can check against the vendor.

Do these rules apply to vendors you have not covered?

That is rather the point of writing them down. Every rule here came from a specific page that broke a reasonable assumption, and none of them depends on the vendor being in our records. They are checks you can run on any pricing page in about a minute.

Do commercial relationships affect what these guides say?

We hold affiliate relationships with some vendors, every page naming one says so, and several of these guides reach conclusions unfavourable to partners — including one whose upper tiers we describe as poor value. No page carries affiliate links, and which pages publish is decided by whether their figures resolve rather than by any arrangement. Our method is on the method page.

The rules on this page are drawn from the guides published across this site, each of which cites the vendor records and dated readings behind it. The single price quoted resolves from a dated record at build time and appears in your edition's own currency. Records referred to were read between 2026-08-26 and 2026-09-03. Where a comparison in this piece is stated as a ratio rather than an amount, it is because the vendors concerned were read in one market only and this page appears in three editions. This page carries no affiliate links. Related: how to read a price record, twelve ways a pricing page fails and when we refuse to compare. The method →

Found a price that no longer matches the vendor’s page? Tell us — corrections are dated and stay on the page.