Why we publish nobody's prices, including our own

Every comparison page you have read this week had a pricing column with numbers in it. Some of those numbers were wrong on the day the page was published. Most of the rest are wrong now.

Ours do not have numbers, and the rule is enforced by our build rather than by good intentions: a pricing figure for any company, including us, fails CI on every page in the comparison and alternatives families.

This post is the argument for that, including the part where it makes our own pages less useful.

The decay is faster than anybody plans for

A price on somebody else's site changes when they decide it changes. They do not tell us. There is no feed. The page we published in March keeps saying nineteen dollars in September with complete confidence and no visible age.

That is the actual problem, and it is not the wrongness. It is that a stale number and a fresh number look identical. A reader has no way to tell which they are holding, so the rational response is to distrust the whole column, which means the column was never doing the job it appeared to do.

Adding "as of March 2026" helps and does not solve it, because the reader still has to go and check, and if they have to go and check, the number was decoration.

What a model tells you that a figure does not

The column on our pages says things like: published self-serve tiers, seat-based rising to enterprise agreements, freemium with a one-off purchase option, per-channel pricing.

Those are not vaguer versions of a price. They are a different and more durable kind of information, because the shape of a pricing model is a claim about who the product is for, and shape changes far more slowly than numbers do.

Three examples of what the shape tells you:

Seat-based means the product assumes a team. Jasper prices per seat, and that is not a detail, it is the whole positioning: governance, roles, approval chains, an organisation generating under one brand. If you are one person, the model itself is telling you that you are not the customer, and no discount changes that.

Per-channel means your bill grows with your surface area. Buffer prices per channel. If you are on two platforms that is cheap forever; if you are on six it is a different product economically, and you can work that out today without knowing a single figure.

Freemium with a one-off purchase means the company expects you to leave. A logo generator like Looka is priced for a transaction, not a relationship, which is honest and matches the job. You buy a mark and go. Compare that with anything priced as a subscription, where the company is betting on you still being there in year two, and the two are making very different promises about what happens after the purchase.

None of those three sentences will be wrong next quarter. Every number attached to them probably will be.

The cost of the rule, stated plainly

This makes our pages worse in one specific way, and pretending otherwise would undo the point of the rule.

A reader who wants to know whether they can afford something has to go and look. That is a real cost, it is paid on the day they most want an answer, and "go and check their site" is a genuinely annoying sentence to read on a page that promised to compare things.

We think that trade is right, because the alternative is not "a reader who gets an answer". It is "a reader who gets an answer that may be a year old and cannot tell", which is worse in the case that actually matters: when they act on it.

But it is a trade, not a free win, and any page that claims a rule costs it nothing is describing a rule it has not applied.

The same rule applied to us

We do not publish our own numbers on these pages either, and that is the part that keeps the rule from being a convenient way to be vague about competitors while being precise about ourselves.

Our model is: early access with published plan mechanics rather than a public price list, and every tool on every plan. That last clause is the load-bearing one and it is a shape claim, not a price claim. It says there is no tier where the good engines live. A reader can hold us to it, and if a "Pro-only" feature ever appears, that sentence is falsifiable in a way "from $19" never was.

If you want the current figures, they are on the pricing page, which is ours to keep accurate and is the one place a number belongs: the page whose owner is the company the number describes.

Where this leaves comparison shopping

The honest summary is that price is the wrong axis to compare these tools on anyway, and the reason is in the previous section: they are not the same shape of product. A per-seat copy platform and a per-channel scheduler and a one-off logo generator cannot be ranked by monthly cost, because they are not selling the same unit.

What can be compared is what each one refuses to do, which is what our comparison pages and alternatives guides are actually for. Seven tools that beat us is the same information with the flattering half removed, what it actually costs to leave a branding tool covers the exit costs that never appear in any pricing column, and how to read a comparison page is the method for reading all of it, ours included, with the right amount of suspicion.

One caveat on the exit costs, since it is the thing pricing pages hide most effectively: the number you should be comparing is not the monthly fee. It is the monthly fee plus what it would cost to leave in eighteen months, and that second figure is usually larger and never published by anybody.