When we refuse to compare: why a page is missing from your edition

A comparison is only worth reading if its numbers are the ones you would pay. Because prices differ by country — and, as it turns out, differ in more than one way — every article here is built once per edition, with each figure resolved against that edition's own dated reading of the vendor. When a figure cannot be resolved for a market, the whole edition of that page is withheld. Nothing is estimated, converted or borrowed from the market next door.

The scale of that is worth stating plainly rather than leaving as an impression. At any given time more than forty article-editions are withheld, spread across all three editions, and roughly a third of our articles appear in fewer editions than they are written for — a dozen or more of them in only one. The exact counts move whenever a vendor is read or an article is written, and the figures as they stood when this page was last rebuilt are in the note at the foot. If you have followed a link and found nothing, or noticed that a comparison exists in one edition and not another, that is the mechanism.

The reason sits in the vendor records rather than in the articles. We hold two hundred and twenty vendor records; one hundred and eight of them carry a paid monthly price at all; and twenty-three can be priced correctly in all three English editions. That last number is the constraint. A vendor read once, in one country, can be written about accurately for that country and nowhere else — and most vendors have been read once.

It is uneven by category in a way that will affect what you find. Nineteen categories holding four or more records have no vendor at all that we can price in every edition — among them hosting, business phone, customer relationship management, form builders, monitoring and several of the AI categories. In those, a British or eurozone reader will find fewer comparisons than an American one, and the difference is entirely about where our reading has reached rather than about the market.

Two shortcuts would close that gap and both are refused. The first is conversion: taking an American price and applying an exchange rate. A converted figure is our arithmetic rather than the vendor's price, it moves every day while the printed number does not, and it is frequently wrong in a specific way — plenty of vendors set a different price for a market rather than converting, so the converted figure would not match what you are actually charged. The second is silent fallback: showing the American figure with a euro sign in front of it. That produces a page that looks complete and is false in the only way that matters, and it is the failure mode we watch for most closely in our own build.

SE Ranking is a fair illustration of why conversion would not work. Its core tier is $129 a month here, and the figures it publishes for the three markets are genuinely different prices rather than one number converted — the British figure is not the American one at any plausible exchange rate. A vendor doing that has made a decision about each market, and only a reading of each market can capture it.

What we do instead is publish where the reading supports it and withhold where it does not. A withheld edition is not a gap we are hiding; it is the visible result of a rule that a page should contain your prices or no prices. Where a comparison you want is missing, the honest summary is that we have read one of those vendors in one market only, and the fix is more reading rather than more arithmetic.

There is a smaller version of the same rule inside pages that do publish. Where a particular figure cannot be resolved — a renewal price a vendor does not print, an allowance that was never captured, a rate held in a form our pages cannot read — the sentence says so rather than carrying an estimate. Several of our guides describe a vendor's figures in words instead of quoting them for exactly this reason, and each says which and why.