How we check prices

Everything on this site is built on one rule: we print the price we read, on the day we read it, from the place you would be charged. Everything below is the detail of that.

Where a price comes from

In order of preference, we take a figure from:

1. The checkout or subscription screen. The screen with a total on it, inside the app or at the end of the sign-up flow. This is the only place a price is definitively real, and it is where a first-term discount stops hiding.
2. The vendor's own pricing page. Reliable for headline annual and monthly figures, less reliable for what happens at renewal, and occasionally out of date relative to what the product is actually charging.
3. The vendor's terms or subscription agreement. Where the renewal language lives, when it exists at all.
4. An app store's in-app purchase list. Not the store's marketing description, which lags the product badly — the itemised list of the exact amounts that store is able to charge your account. We reach for it only when a vendor's own pages will not serve us a figure, which in 2026 happens more often than it should, and the record says so when we do.

Each price record on this site names its source in a field you can read — "in-app subscription screen", "vendor pricing page", "Apple US App Store in-app purchase list", and so on. If two of those sources disagree, we use the one closest to your card and we say which one it was.

We do not take prices from other comparison sites, from a store's marketing copy, from press releases, or from a vendor's marketing email. Those are all downstream of the number we want. A store's purchase list is not: it is the amount, in dollars, that the store will bill.

Every figure is dated

A price without a date is a rumour. Every figure on this site carries a checked date, it appears in the table next to the number, and it is the date a person at this desk read that specific figure — not the date the page was published, and not the date the site was last rebuilt.

This matters more than it sounds. Subscription pricing moves without announcement, and a figure that is eight months old may be a different figure now. When you see an old date next to a price, treat the date as part of the price.

The renewal column

This column is the reason the site exists, so we are strict about it. It can say one of three things:

• A number. The vendor states a renewal price and we read it. It is shown in the same billing period as the headline price.
• Same. The vendor states that the subscription renews at the price you first paid. We only print this when the vendor says so.
• Not published. We looked and did not find a stated renewal price.

We would rather leave that column visibly empty than fill it with an assumption. An inferred renewal price is the one mistake on a site like this that could genuinely cost a reader money, and it is not a mistake we are willing to make in order to have a tidier table.

Prices are regional

Unless a page says otherwise, every figure here is the United States list price in US dollars, before tax, for a personal or individual plan.

That is a real limitation and we would rather state it than bury it. The same subscription is frequently priced differently in the UK, the EU, Latin America and India — sometimes by a little, sometimes by a great deal, and occasionally with different renewal terms attached. Tax treatment differs too: some markets quote prices with VAT included and some do not. If you are outside the US, use our figures for the comparison between products and check your own checkout screen for the amount.

Yearly equivalents

Where something is sold monthly we also show what twelve months of it comes to, because that is the number this site is about and almost nobody displays it. It is straightforward arithmetic — the monthly price times twelve — and it assumes you keep the subscription for a full year at the same rate. It is a comparison figure, not a quote.

How often we look again

Every record on the ledger is re-checked at least twice a year. In practice the categories that move — VPNs, AI subscriptions, streaming — get looked at considerably more often than that, because that is where the changes are.

Beyond the schedule, we re-check whenever a vendor announces a change, whenever a reader tells us a figure looks wrong, and whenever we are writing something new that touches a record. When a price does change, the record is updated, the checked date moves, and the change is what triggers a piece of writing. This desk has no publishing calendar; a price change is the calendar.

What we do when we are wrong

We fix it, and we log it with a date and a plain description of what was wrong, on the corrections page. We do not silently edit a figure. If a number on this site was wrong for six weeks, the log will say it was wrong for six weeks.

If you have found a price that does not match what you are being charged, that is exactly the thing we want to hear about — especially if you have a renewal invoice, since those are the hardest figures for us to obtain and the most valuable ones we can publish.