A pricing page is a sales document. It is accurate, and it is arranged to make one tier look obvious. Reading it well means knowing which parts are a price and which parts are a condition on that price.
We read the published pricing of 30 vendors by hand and recorded every tier: 143 tiers in total, a median of 5 per vendor. Of those tiers, 29 carried a condition attached to the price itself — 20% of every tier we catalogued. That is a base rate across what we catalogued, not a probability for whatever tier is in front of you — the vendors were chosen because they recur on the statements we see, not sampled at random. Read it as a reason to expect a condition and go looking for it, rather than as odds.
Read the unit before the number
The first question is not “how much” but “how much of what”. Per seat, per active user, per workspace, per environment, per thousand events, per gigabyte stored, per gigabyte transferred. Two vendors quoting the same figure can differ severalfold once you know what the figure counts.
The second question is who decides the count. A per-seat price you control is a budget. A per-event price your traffic controls is a variable cost with a sales-shaped ceiling.
Find the condition on the price
The conditions we found attached to prices fall into a few recognisable shapes, in rough order of how often they turned up:
- Sold separately. The largest group by some way. A sibling product, an engineer seat type, a storage or retention upgrade, an add-on per site — priced on its own and added to whatever the base plan costs.
- Billed annually. The number shown is the monthly-equivalent of an annual prepayment. Paying monthly costs more: the lower number is what a term commitment buys.
- Excluding usage. The tier price covers the platform; the metered component is separate and additive. Sometimes it is billed in arrears, so the first invoice arrives after the spending.
- Minimum seats. The per-seat price applies above a floor. Below it, you pay the floor.
- Priced on a count. The per-unit price moves when some count crosses a band boundary — downward with team size in one case we catalogued, upward with contact volume in others.
- Early-termination fee. The most expensive one to find late: leaving inside the term costs a share of what is left on it.
- One-off fee. A charge that lands once rather than every term — onboarding or implementation, quoted beside the subscription and easy to read as part of it.
Two more things worth knowing. A tier priced “Custom” is not a condition, it is the absence of a price — expect the quote to reflect what the vendor learns about you first. And a price that varies by region is a condition you cannot see from one page.
Check the tier boundary you are nearest to
The tier you belong to is decided by a count — seats, records, events, projects — and that count usually moves in one direction. The useful exercise is to find the boundary above you and work out what crossing it costs, before a normal quarter crosses it for you.
What the page will not tell you
A pricing page describes the offer, not your invoice. Add-ons, sibling products, support tiers, and overage all bill separately, so the real monthly figure comes from an itemised invoice rather than from the page you are reading.
Every vendor’s own entry in the glossary records the tiers we found and the conditions attached to them, and the full report publishes the whole pricing dataset as a free CSV, including which fields we left blank because we did not measure them. Once a renewal is close, the pre-renewal checks are the shorter list.