Independent Software Pricing & Cost Intelligence
Verified pricing, hidden costs, alternatives, API analysis, and buying insights.
§ 01 The record
Somebody has to keep the books on software pricing.
Updated · every price carries its own check date
495 products, 44 categories, 2,131 plans independently priced and dated, with every movement written into a public changelog. 59 products moved a published number in the last thirty days, and the page you are on is where that gets recorded.
Search the ledger
Every movement we recorded, with the day it was written down and the plan it belongs to.
421 price changes on the record · newest 0244 categories, each closed with a written verdict, a leader and a transparency score.
44 of 44 re-checked 034 MCP servers and llms.txt feeds carrying the same dated prices this page shows.
MCP · llms.txt · JSON · CC BY 4.0One price tells you what a vendor charges; its record tells you where it is going. The catalog is re-verified in dated sweeps, every movement lands in the public changelog, and here is what the latest window put on the record.
A single price list is a photograph. Anybody can copy today's number off a vendor page and publish it, and most directories do exactly that and then leave it there for a year. The record of movements is what turns a page of numbers into evidence, because it shows what the vendor did while nobody was expected to be looking.
The public book now holds 421 recorded price changes. In the last thirty days alone, 59 products moved a published number: 43 increases, 26 decreases, and 50 prices that stepped out of the Custom column. None of that shows up in a catalog that is only ever read once.
The busiest shelves of the window, with their stories.
6 increases, 3 decreases, 1 newly printed price recorded on the public book this window.
Open the website builders verdict2 increases, 1 decrease, 7 newly printed prices recorded on the public book this window.
Open the ai image generators verdict4 increases, 4 decreases recorded on the public book this window.
Open the cloud hosting verdictHolding the prior check. The three plans as the book last held them: $827 a month between them.
Holding the August 5, 2026 reading. The same three plans now come to $690 a month, and the net movement is $137 a month in the buyer's favour.
One dated price is enough to compare. Two dated prices are enough to negotiate, because you can show a vendor its own number from a month ago and ask what changed besides the invoice.
The freshest 16 entries from the book, written down as the numbers changed. Filter them by what kind of movement it was. The page does not move while you do it.
two of these 16 lines are vendors putting a number where the word Custom used to be. If you were quoted under a custom arrangement before these dates, that is the moment to ask how your rate compares to the one now printed in public.
Copilot recognises the vendor page you have open and puts the dated entry from this ledger on top of it: the starting price, whether a free plan exists, the transparency score and the day it was last checked. No tab switching, no account.
notion.so
Starts at
$12/user/mo
cursor.com
Starts at
$20/user/mo
semrush.com
Starts at
$139/mo
The moment you actually need this ledger is the moment you are reading a vendor's pricing page. That is where the card puts the check date, and where it tells you the category moved without you.
The names people ask about most, with the number the vendor publishes, the day we last checked it, and the thing worth reading twice before a signature goes anywhere near a contract.
| Software | Entry price | Free plan | Transparency | Checked | What to check before you sign |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforcecrm | $25per user/mo | Free plan: yes | 88 | The entry price is per seat. Ask which edition it buys before you multiply it by the team. | |
| HubSpotcrm | $25per month | Free plan: yes | 89 | This entry price is per month, not per seat. Find where the per seat charge starts above it. | |
| Notionproject-management | $12per user/mo | Free plan: yes | 79 | Per seat. Check what the free plan stops doing once the team grows past a handful of people. | |
| Cursorai-coding | $20per user/mo | Free plan: yes | 84 | Per seat. Read the category's changelog line before you renew at last year's rate. | |
| Semrushseo-tools | $139per month | Free plan: no | 77 | No free plan to test on. Check how many seats and projects the entry tier actually carries. | |
| OpenAI APIllm | Usageno entry ticket | Free plan: no | 86 | Priced by what you consume, so there is no monthly number to compare. Model your tokens first. |
A published entry price is a starting line, not a quote. Two of these six publish no free plan and one publishes no price at all, which is worth knowing before a trial becomes a procurement cycle.
Moonshot AI arrives with six plans and open weights announced. The API price went on the books the day it was read: $3 in and $15 out per million tokens. That is the number the rest of the category now gets held against when somebody asks why the invoice grew.
As recorded
Products enter dated. Nothing goes on the board without the day it was read.
A new entrant that publishes token prices gives you something the incumbent has to answer for. Print both lines and put them side by side at the renewal meeting.
44 verdicts, one per category, each carrying a date and a signature rather than a floating star rating. The figure beside each leader is its transparency score.
Read the score as a measure of how much homework the vendor has already done for you. A low one is not an accusation, it is a warning that you will be asking the questions yourself.
Category size is a rough map of how crowded a decision is. Four AI meeting tools is a shortlist you can read in an afternoon. Twenty-four hosts is a market where the renewal terms matter more than the logo.
The corner of the catalog where vendors publish the least. 65 tools with coverage maps and the head to head reads that usually sit behind an analyst paywall.
What the desk covers
Head-to-head verdicts on file
EDRCrowdStrike vs SentinelOne→CNAPPOrca Security vs Wiz→ComplianceDrata vs Vanta→IAMIdentity, 12 tools compared→In this part of the market most vendors quote rather than publish. Start from what each tool actually covers, then ask for the number with the coverage map already in your hand.
What the agent vendors charge, how they meter it, and where the per seat model quietly stopped applying.
Read the reportReport 02Token prices across the model providers, put on one scale so a monthly bill can be estimated before it lands.
Read the reportReport 03The category that cut six prices and raised none between our two checks, read tool by tool.
Read the reportTake the category number into the meeting, not the product number. Procurement argues with a market average far more easily than with one vendor's list price.
You do not have to draft the discount letter yourself. The negotiation guide covers the moves that work on software contracts. The email generator sits on 222 cost guides and drops the vendor's own published number, with its check date, straight into the draft.
What the desk holds
A discount request lands better with a date on it. Every number the generator uses carries its verification date.
Send the request before the auto renewal window closes, and quote the published price rather than your invoice. It moves the conversation from your budget to the vendor's own page.
§ 14 Readable by machines
The same dated prices this page shows, exposed as MCP servers, llms.txt feeds and JSON, under CC BY 4.0 with no key. Each record carries its check date, which is what lets an assistant say how fresh its answer is instead of guessing.
If an assistant does your shortlisting, point it at the feeds. It will read the same numbers and the same dates you do, which is the only way to check whether it made the answer up.
ComparEdge is an independent cost intelligence desk for software. A vendor's pricing page tells you the list price; we tell you what the tool actually costs to run: the verified entry price, the fees that surface after the signature, the tiers that quietly move between renewals, and the alternatives worth quoting back when the invoice arrives. Rankings follow a scoring method we publish in full; no vendor can buy a position, a score or a verdict, and when we get a number wrong the correction is dated and public.
Independent verification, dated records, public corrections. Data is open under CC BY 4.0 for anyone who wants to check the arithmetic themselves.
Every figure carries the day it was checked: the ledger's newest entry landed August 5, 2026, and all 44 category verdicts were re-checked on July 29, 2026. The Checked column next to a price is the honest answer to this question for that product. When a vendor moves a number between sweeps, the change lands in the public changelog with its own date, so you can see the price and how long it has held.
It reads how much of the real cost a vendor publishes, weighted with how satisfied its customers report being. A tool at 100 puts its prices, tiers and limits in the open. Use a low score as a checklist generator: it tells you which costs are not on the page, and those are exactly the questions to put in writing before the demo call, not after it.
Because the vendor does not publish one, and we refuse to invent it. Quote-only stays quote-only rather than being filled with an estimate. When you have to walk into that sales call anyway, take the category benchmark and the negotiation notes with you; a vendor who publishes nothing negotiates differently against a buyer who arrives with the market's numbers.
Direction. One price tells you what a vendor charges today; its record tells you which way it is walking. The book holds 421 dated price changes, and in the last thirty days 59 products moved a number, 161 plans lost a tier and 91 gained one. A rising shelf means yesterday's quote was the cheap one; a falling shelf means waiting a quarter is a real negotiating move.
Three stops, in order. Read your vendor's line in the changelog to see what moved since you signed. Read the category verdict to see whether the shelf around them got cheaper. Then open the tool's cost guide and let the email generator draft the request with the published number and its date already in it. Send it before the auto renewal window closes, not after.
No. There are no paid rankings, no sponsored rows and no slot to buy at the top of a table. Positions come from the published evidence and the category verdict. Where affiliate arrangements exist they never move a product up a list, never change a score and never decide which verdict gets written.
The entry gets re-verified. If the number moved, the correction is published with a new date and written into the changelog like any other movement. Corrections are never quietly swapped in, because the date attached to a price is the part that makes it worth anything. Report through the contact page.
Yes, through 4 MCP servers, llms.txt feeds and JSON feeds. They carry the same dated prices the page shows, so an assistant answers a pricing question straight from the record and can say how fresh its answer is instead of guessing. Feeds are free, keyless and licensed CC BY 4.0.
The record is one body of evidence, but it answers a different question depending on who is holding the invoice.
When the card on file is yours, a free tier that quietly stops being free is a real event. The catalog flags which 307 tools carry a working free plan, what each one stops doing as the team grows, and which cheap alternative does the same job a tier lower.
API pricing hides in rate cards, not plan tables. The ledger keeps both: per-seat plans beside usage rates, with calculators that turn your actual volume into a monthly figure before the first invoice does it for you.
A rise on the changelog is usually how this starts. Every product carries a worked alternatives page, head to head, so the shortlist is built from verified prices rather than from whoever bids highest on the search term.
In the enterprise corner of the market the price is a conversation, and the side with dated evidence runs it. Category benchmarks, 222 cost guides with a letter generator, and pricing reports built for the meeting where someone finally asks what this should cost.