How we evaluate real costs

Software pricing pages often hide the true long-term price behind aggressive intro discounts and complex tier calculations. Here's exactly what we check, and how a Real Cost Score comes together.

What we check

Renewal Rate Tracking: We look beyond the first-year discount to calculate total 3-year ownership costs, since intro pricing is often much lower than what you actually pay on renewal.
Feature Lockouts: We identify critical features (like SSL, backups, or DKIM setup) that require paid add-ons, even when they're implied to be included.
Tier Escalation: We map out what happens to your bill when your contacts, traffic, or team size increases past the plan's starting limits.

A worked example

Say a provider advertises "$5/month" as the headline price. Here's the kind of breakdown we run before that number ends up in a Real Cost Score:

Is $5/month the intro rate, or the renewal rate? If it renews at $12/month, the 3-year cost is very different from what the homepage implies.
Does that plan include SSL, backups, and support — or are those paid add-ons bringing the real monthly cost closer to $15–20?
What happens at your actual scale — e.g. once you pass the included seat or contact limit? Some tools jump a full pricing tier for one extra user.

Once we have real numbers for all of this, it feeds into the five-criteria Real Cost Score — see the About & Methodology page for how that scoring works.

Using the calculator

Our calculator lets you plug in your own team size, usage, or contact count to see how a provider's price actually scales for your situation — rather than relying on the generic "starting from" price shown on their marketing page.