We show a price on 5,092 software listings, and none of them says when it was true

We show a price on 5,092 software listings, and none of them says when it was true

We publish 12,184 software listings. On 5,092 of them there is a price — "$39.00/month", "$12.00/month/user", "$999.00/one-time" — sitting in the key facts at the top of the page, where a buyer looks first. We counted them this morning because of a question we should have asked a long time ago: when was each of those prices true?

The answer is that we cannot say, for any of them. The field that holds the price has no date beside it and no source. Nothing on the page, and nothing in our database, records when the figure was read or where it was read from.

What we can say is when the listings themselves were created and last touched. 4,743 of the 5,092 were created in a single import in 2020. 344 have no creation date at all, and five were added later. The rows they sit on were last updated between 2020 and 2023 for 5,074 of them — all but eighteen. So the price you see on almost any of these pages is, at best, a figure that was true at some point three or more years ago, and possibly earlier, because we do not know how old the source of the import was either.

Our own products are not part of this. We list 21 Rutba products and none of them carries a price, so none is among the 5,092; leaving them out of the total changes the share from 5,092 of 12,184 to 5,092 of 12,163, which is 41.9% either way.

This piece is about that gap: how big it is, what a sample of those prices looks like today, why an undated price does more harm than no price, and how to read any software price — ours included — so that it cannot mislead you.

Where the prices came from, and what they leave out

The prices arrived with the catalogue. They are stored as short strings, and the string carries its own unit: 1,997 are per month, 1,365 per user per month, 975 one-time, 371 per year, 207 per user per year, and 177 in some other form. A second copy of the number is held as a bare "starting price", which 4,965 listings carry.

Nearly everything a buyer would need to interpret the figure is missing. Not one of the 5,092 records a setup fee or a minimum number of seats. Not one says which plan the price belongs to, whether it is the monthly or the annual rate, which currency it was quoted in before it became dollars, or whether tax is included. We added a structured way to record a full plan table — names, prices, intervals, what each includes — and 19 listings use it.

One thing the old figures do not do, and it is worth saying so plainly: they do not move anyone's position in our rankings. The ranking order counts whether a listing has the structured plan table, not whether it has one of these strings. The stale prices are a problem of what a reader is told, not of how the lists are ordered.

That is still a serious problem. A price in the key facts of a listing is read as a present-tense statement. It looks exactly as authoritative as the company name next to it.

What thirty of them say today

A count tells you the size of a gap, not what is inside it. So we drew thirty of the 5,092 at random — by a seeded hash of each listing's address, so that anyone repeating the draw gets the same thirty — and checked every one against the vendor's own pricing or product page on 21 September 2026. Not a review site, not a comparison table, not an aggregator: only the vendor's own words about its own price.

Six of the thirty still show the price we hold. Even that overstates it slightly, because in two of the six the amount matches and the unit does not: one vendor now states its $39 as per user, where our record has no user at all, and another charges its $25 per facility.

Six have changed. A collection-management product we list at $120 a year now starts at $149.99 a year on its own page. A market-intelligence product we list at $80.41 per user per month is now sold as an annual package in euros, at €3,564 a year for three analysts. A booking system we list at $89 a month now quotes €90 a month plus a €220 setup fee and a six-month minimum. A childcare platform we list at $99 per user per month now charges $129 per location, with unlimited users. A therapy-records system still lists our $75 per user per month, but as its full-time plan, with cheaper entry tiers below it. A workspace-management product now prices in pounds for the visitor we could reach it from, at £145 a month, and would not show us a dollar figure at all.

Ten no longer publish a price. They have moved to "contact sales", a custom quote, a demo request or usage-based pricing behind a form. That is a third of the sample, and it is the most common single outcome.

Five have been acquired or renamed. An Amazon-advertising tool now redirects to the company that bought it, whose entry plan is $695 a month against the $57 we show. An asset-finance platform has been renamed by its own vendor, with no price on the new page. A travel-expense product now lives under a new name at the same $3 per user per month. A zero-trust access product was bought by a security company and folded into one of its own lines. And one floristry product joined another company on 15 September 2020 — nearly three months before the listing for it was created in our import. The listing was out of date on the day it arrived.

Two are gone: one domain no longer exists, and one vendor's site has been in "maintenance downtime" with an expired certificate every time we tried, which may yet prove temporary. One we could not identify at all: no vendor site we could find was unambiguously the same product.

Thirty is a small sample, and the honest way to report it is as a range. Six in thirty is 20%; the uncertainty around a sample that size puts the true share of our prices that still match somewhere between about one in ten and about one in three. Applied to 5,092 listings, that is somewhere between roughly 500 and 1,900 prices that are still right, and the rest are not — or cannot be checked, which for a buyer comes to the same thing.

Why an undated price is worse than no price

A missing price sends a buyer to the vendor. That is a nuisance, but it is an honest one: the buyer knows they do not know, and they go and find out.

An undated price does something different. It answers the question, so the buyer stops asking. It anchors a budget, a shortlist or a comparison on a number that may belong to a plan that no longer exists, in a currency the vendor no longer quotes, per a unit the vendor no longer charges by. Our sample shows each of those failures, often in combination: the booking system's figure is wrong in amount, currency and structure at once, because a setup fee and a minimum term have appeared where there were none.

The single most useful thing a price can tell you is when it was true. Without that, every other property of the number is uncheckable. With it, even a figure that is years old becomes useful — as a record of where the vendor started, from which a buyer can see how far the price has moved.

There is a second, quieter harm. Ten of our thirty vendors no longer publish a price at all. The disappearance of a public price is itself information: it usually means the vendor has moved up-market, or to pricing that depends on the customer, or to a sales process in which the price is a negotiation. A listing that still shows the old public figure hides that change. It tells a small buyer the product is within reach when the vendor has since decided it is not selling to them in that way any more.

And a third. Seven of the thirty products have been acquired, renamed or have disappeared. A price is the most visibly dated fact on a listing, but it is not the only one that ages. If the price is years old, so, very likely, is the name, the description and the website. The price was simply the fact we checked.

What a price needs before it can be trusted

It helps to look at vendors that get this right, because the good practice is not complicated. None of what follows is a recommendation of the products; it is about how the price is stated.

A price should carry its date and its terms of change. The clearest example we read this week is a notes application whose pricing page makes a written commitment: no increase for three years, and after that a cap of 10% a year. Whatever one thinks of the product, a buyer can plan against that. Most software pricing pages make no statement about the future at all.

A price should carry its whole structure, including the part that works against the vendor. A small e-commerce platform we listed this week publishes every card rate on every tier, including the 6% plus 30 cents it charges on its free plan against 2.9% on its cheapest paid one. That lets a seller calculate the point at which the paid plan pays for itself, which is exactly the number a less candid page would keep off the screen.

A price change should come with a date, in writing, in advance. One of the largest collaboration-software vendors told its cloud customers on 28 August that list prices would rise on 13 October, and announced separately on 1 September that three kinds of AI and automation usage would be billed from 3 December. Whatever the merits of the rise, the dates are public, and a customer can act before them.

And a product that is ending should say so with a date and an hour. A widely used project-management service retires at 08:00 Pacific time on 30 September 2026, and its vendor's lifecycle page says so to the hour. A listing that still showed that product's price after that date would be quoting a price for something that cannot be bought.

Put together, those examples describe the minimum a price needs: the amount; the currency; the unit; the plan it belongs to; what is excluded, such as setup fees, minimum terms and usage charges; the date it was read; and the page it was read from. Our 5,092 records carry the first three of those seven, some of the time.

How to read a software price — ours included

Until every price we show carries a date and a source, the only safe way to read one on our pages is as a historical record: a sign that the product was once sold at roughly that level, not a quote. The same method works for any price you meet on any comparison site, and on vendors' own pages too.

Find the date. If a price has no date, assume it is old. If the vendor's own page has no date, note the day you read it, because that is the only date the figure will ever have.

Read it on the vendor's page, today. A price repeated anywhere else — including here — is a copy, and copies age. It takes a minute, and in our sample it would have changed the answer more than three times out of four.

Check the unit before the amount. Per month or per year; per user, per seat, per location, per facility or per account; billed monthly or annually. Several of the changes in our sample kept a similar number and changed what it was a number of.

Look for what the headline leaves out. Setup fees, minimum terms, minimum seats, usage that is metered above an allowance, and card or transaction fees. These are the parts of a bill most often missing from a headline price, and the parts that grow.

Ask what caps it at renewal. A price you can budget against is one with a written limit on how far it can rise. If there is none, the price you are quoted is the price for the first term only. Our due-diligence checklist for a software vendor includes the questions to ask, and the new checklist for responding when a supplier changes the deal covers what to do when the notice arrives.

Treat "contact sales" as a fact, not a gap. It tells you the price depends on you, and that the first figure you are given is an opening position.

Check the name while you are there. If the product now redirects somewhere else, the price you were reading belongs to a company that may no longer exist.

What we are doing about ours

We are reporting this before fixing it, because the fix is a choice and the choice should be made in the open. There are two honest options for a price we cannot vouch for: date it, by reading the vendor's page and recording when and where we read it, or stop showing it. What we will not do is refresh the figures by guessing, or copy them from another directory that has the same problem, because a newer number with no source is no more trustworthy than an older one.

Until that is done, a price on one of our software listings is a record of where a product once was. If you are about to rely on one — for a budget, a shortlist or a comparison — check it on the vendor's own page first. Our sample suggests that for most of them you will find a different answer.