November 3, 2026 · Pricing
The pricing page is the least honest page a vendor publishes
We weight price-to-value at 15% of the score, the lowest of our four axes. That is not because price matters least. It is because the number on the pricing page is the least reliable thing a vendor tells you.
A supplier sends an RFQ for 4,000 units. You open three AI tools to draft the reply, compare the three quotes, and pick the one that reads best. All three looked affordable when you signed up that morning. Only one of them still looks affordable at the volume you actually work at.
This happens to us roughly every other week, and it is why our scorecard puts price-to-value last. Not because cost is unimportant — because the price is the one input we cannot verify from the outside, and vendors know it.
Three ways the headline number lies
Credits that expire. A plan advertised as "2,000 credits" tells you nothing until you know whether they roll over, and most do not. A team that uses 900 credits in a busy month and 300 in a quiet one pays for 2,000 either way. The effective price per unit of work is higher than the sticker, sometimes by half.
Seats that assume a seat per human. Per-seat pricing works when each person does their own work. Export operations are not shaped like that: one person runs the listing, another proofs the translation, a third approves the price. Three people touch one document. Vendors count three seats; you needed one.
Free tiers that are demo quotas. A "free" plan with 20 generations a month is not a free tier, it is a trial with a longer name. We list these as Paid, because a plan that cannot survive a single afternoon of real work is not a plan you can evaluate on.
What we do instead
We test on a fixed brief — a 40-SKU listing in three languages, a supplier negotiation email, a 90-second product video, an RFQ comparison sheet — and record what the task cost in the unit the vendor actually bills in. Then we publish the volume band where the tool stops being the cheap option. That sentence is more useful than any headline figure, and it is the reason our listings read like notes rather than spec sheets.
It also means we sometimes list a tool as Paid when its homepage says "free forever", and occasionally the reverse. We would rather be corrected by a vendor than quietly wrong for a year.
What we want vendors to publish
A table with one row per task and one column per unit price. Not "starting at $20" — the cost of the 40-SKU listing, at 10 a month and at 500 a month. If a vendor published that, we would stop writing this section of the review, and every buyer would be better off.
Until then, treat the pricing page as a marketing asset rather than a fact. Ask what happens to unused credits in month two. Ask whether a reviewer counts as a seat. Ask for the invoice, not the calculator.
This is the position the library is built on. If you have been quoted a number that turned out to be half the real cost, send it to us — we will test it and, if it holds, amend the listing.