Why we do not publish prices we have not verified
Almost every software review site prints a price for every tier of every product. We often do not, and readers occasionally ask why a comparison table has holes in it. This page explains the rule, shows three cases where it mattered, and is the reason you will sometimes find "unknown" where a competitor has a confident number.
The rule
A price appears on this site only if we have seen it on the vendor's own page, on a date we can name, in a currency we can name. If we cannot meet all three conditions, we describe the structure and say the figure is unknown.
Three corollaries:
- We do not estimate from memory. Prices change, and a remembered figure is a guess with a date attached to it.
- We do not infer one tier's price from another's. Tier ratios are not stable across vendors or across years.
- We do not convert currencies at a rate we cannot vouch for, or smooth over the fact that a vendor prices in euros.
Case one: the tier with no price
When we requested HubSpot's Professional-tier page in October 2026, it served the free-tools page with a "Talk to Sales" form and no figure. A review site has three options here: find the number somewhere else, estimate it, or say it is unpublished.
We said it is unpublished — and then used that fact as the finding, because it is one. If you cannot price a tier from the website, you cannot budget year two from the website. For a small team choosing a CRM, that is more useful information than a number copied from a blog post written two years ago. It appears in HubSpot vs Pipedrive as the central argument rather than a footnote.
Case two: the currency the page chose for us
HubSpot's Starter tier displayed SGD 10 per seat on annual billing against SGD 28 on monthly — because the page geo-detected our request as coming from Singapore. We could have converted to USD and printed a clean number. We did not, because the conversion would be ours, not the vendor's, and the reader would have no way to tell.
Instead we print the currency we were shown and the ratio, which is the durable information: a 2.8× difference between annual and monthly billing is true regardless of what the dollar figure is.
Case three: the page we could not read
Teachable's pricing page is fully rendered by JavaScript; our capture returned marketing copy and no plan data. Rather than reconstruct its tiers from secondary sources, we have simply not published a Teachable pricing breakdown. Eight planned articles that depended on course-platform pricing are on hold for the same reason.
That decision costs us traffic. The keyword is competitive and the page would rank. It also means that when we do publish it, the number will be right — which is the only asset a review site actually has.
What we do publish, and how it is sourced
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| "Verified October 23, 2026" | We saw this figure on the vendor's page on that date. We re-check quarterly. |
| A currency symbol other than USD | That is the currency the vendor published. We have not converted it. |
| "Monthly rate not captured" | The page showed one billing mode; we did not toggle or could not. We are not guessing the other. |
| "Not available" or "unknown" | No published figure exists, or we could not reach one. |
| A calculated number | Derived from the figures above, with the arithmetic shown so you can check it. |
The distinction we do not blur: pricing versus testing
Pricing is verifiable from a page. How a product behaves is not, and we treat those claims separately. Every article carries a "What we cannot verify" section listing exactly what we have not done — usually the hands-on testing cycle, real deliverability, support responsiveness, or migration fidelity.
That is why our articles say things like "this is an expectation from product design, not a measurement." It reads less confidently than the genre standard. It is also the only version of the sentence that is true.
How to report a price we got wrong
Email [email protected] with the page and the date. If the vendor's page shows something different from what we printed, we correct the article and add a dated note saying what changed. We do not quietly edit a number — a correction is information, and hiding it would defeat the purpose of dating everything.
Why this matters commercially, honestly
This site earns affiliate commissions, which is disclosed on every page. Commission is never tied to a rating, and our pricing rule is the mechanism that keeps it that way — a site that invents numbers to fill comparison tables has already begun optimising for something other than the reader. Our full terms are in the Editorial Policy, and the testing method is on How We Test.