Pricing

How this price was set

Placement on comparable directories runs anywhere from fifty to several hundred dollars a month. We landed at $49 for three reasons, and none of them is "what the market will bear".

• It has to be worth more than the clicks cost. At $49 a month, a placement pays for itself if it sends a handful of qualified trials. A tool with a $200 customer lifetime value needs two conversions; a tool with a $20,000 one needs a fraction of one.
• It has to be low enough to say yes without a meeting. Under twenty dollars reads as advertising inventory nobody wants. Over a hundred requires a budget owner, a PO, and a six-week approval chain. Fifty is the range where a founder can decide alone.
• It has to be high enough that we do not need twelve of them. Cheap placement forces you to sell every slot to make the month work, which is how a category page turns into an ad column. Four slots at this price is a living; twenty slots at fifteen dollars is a death spiral with better cash flow for one quarter.

And the honest caveat: this is launch pricing for a directory without a traffic history. When there is data, the price moves — existing renewals keep their rate.

Who pays for what, in one table

The rules we are not going to move on

• Readers never hit a paywall. A directory that gates its listings loses the search traffic that makes the listings worth anything.
• Money buys placement and verification, never ranking in organic lists, comparisons, or best-of pages.
• Every paid placement is labeled and carries a sponsored link attribute.
• No paid reviews. A review that cannot be negative is an advertisement with worse typography.

Questions

Do readers ever have to pay?

No. Every listing, category, comparison, and alternatives table stays free and unauthenticated. A directory that gates its content loses the search traffic that makes a listing worth buying.

So who is actually paying?

Makers — the teams that built the tools — pay for placement on a category page, a verified badge, and a dashboard showing what the listing produced. Analysts pay for the dataset. Readers pay nothing and see one labeled ad slot.

Does paying move me up the organic list?

No. Paid placement is a separate slot at the top of a category page, labeled as sponsored, and it never enters organic lists, comparisons, or best-of pages. If we sold ranking, the comparisons would stop meaning anything, and the comparisons are why anyone reads this site.

What is the verified badge actually verifying?

That we checked the listing against the vendor's own documentation and the vendor confirmed the pricing is current. It is a statement about the record, not about the product quality.

Can I cancel?

Monthly, no lock-in, cancel from the dashboard. The listing stays; only the paid placement disappears.