How PriceTrail collects and checks its data

1. Reading the pages

An automated reader visits the public pricing page of every company listed here — every day for the most-searched names, every Monday for the rest. It strips away navigation, banners and chat widgets and compares what remains with the previous version. If the page text is identical, nothing more happens; most days, for most pages, that is the result.

When the text has changed, an AI model reads it and records each plan: name, monthly price, annual price per month, whether it is free, per user, an add-on or “contact sales”, and its main limits. It is told to record only what the page states and to leave a value blank rather than guess. Struck-through and promotional prices are recorded as the standard price.

2. Confirming a change

Nothing is published on one reading. A new figure must appear on two separate readings before it replaces the old one. A reading that would remove most of a company's prices, or take its pricing off the page, must hold for three days.

A page that loads without its prices is not news. Some pricing pages fill in their numbers after the page has loaded, so the reader sometimes gets the page without them. When that happens the last confirmed figures stay up and the page is flagged; only if the prices stay missing for two weeks is it recorded as a change.

Reversals are labelled, not deleted. If an entry is undone within three weeks — a plan removed and then re-added, prices hidden then shown — both entries are marked “reversed” and kept out of the headline figures. So far 26 entries have been marked this way. A plan removed and another added on the same day at the same price is shown as a rename.

Tiny moves (under 1%) are treated as rounding, and any move of more than four times the old price is held for a person to check, because that is almost always a misreading rather than a repricing.

3. What the labels mean

Confirmed: published after confirmation. Reversed: undone within three weeks. Unconfirmed: about prices appearing or disappearing on a page that has loaded inconsistently before. Corrected: reviewed by a person, with the reason shown.

4. Currencies

Prices are never converted. Each price is shown in the currency the vendor's own page displayed, and pages are always read as the same visitor — one in the United States — so that today's figure and last month's are the same measurement. Converting would make a price that never moved appear to change every day with the exchange rate. Where a company quotes in a different currency from the rest of its category, it is left out of that category's typical starting price.

5. What this cannot tell you

Quote-only plans have no public figure, so enterprise pricing is largely invisible here. Prices can vary by country, and what you are shown may differ. Discounts negotiated with sales are not public. A page read this morning may have changed this afternoon. Readings are automated and can be wrong — which is why every figure links to its source page and the day it was read.

6. Corrections

The raw change log is never edited. When something on it is wrong, a correction is written into a separate, public corrections file with the date, what was wrong and why. The site shows the correction next to the original entry. To report a wrong figure, tell us here.