Research · version 2026-09-11
The pricing transparency index
Between August and September 2026 we opened the pricing page of every product in this catalogue by hand and wrote down one thing: could a person actually read a price off it?
Of the 472 products where an editor reached the vendor's own page, 202 carried no usable figure — 42.8%. Not a rounded number, not an estimate: 270 products told us what they cost and 202 did not.
What this does not claim
This is the part most write-ups skip, so it goes first. The measurement is "no readable figure was found", not "the vendor is hiding the price". Those are different sentences and only the first one is supported by our data.
- Some prices are rendered by JavaScript our reader could not execute. The figure exists; we could not see it. Those records count as "not found" and that is a limit of the method.
- Some vendors show prices in the visitor's local currency. We refused to write a figure we could not attribute to a stable source, so those count as not found too.
- Usage-based pricing is not evasion. It is broken out separately below precisely so nobody has to take our word for how it was classified.
- 40 products in the catalogue carry no dated evidence record — nobody has checked them properly yet. They are excluded from every number on this page. "We did not look" is not a finding about a vendor.
Every classification is traceable to a source URL and the date it was read. If you think a record is wrong, the CSV below names the product; tell us and we will re-check it.
Why 202 products had no figure
Lumping these together would hide the most interesting result. Split by reason:
| Reason | Products | Share of the 202 |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier announced, paid tier priced nowhere The most common shape by a distance. The vendor is happy to tell you the part that costs nothing and goes quiet about the part that costs money. | 84 | 42% |
| Pricing page exists, carries no number at all A page titled Pricing that names plans and features without ever printing a figure. In some of these the number is rendered by JavaScript we could not read — see the caveats below. | 59 | 29% |
| Priced per unit of usage Per request, per seat-hour, per gigabyte. These are genuinely hard to reduce to one monthly figure, and we do not count them as evasion. | 37 | 18% |
| Contact us for a quote The honest version of opacity: the vendor states plainly that the price is negotiated. Rarer than the reputation of enterprise software suggests. | 22 | 11% |
The headline is not "contact us for a quote" — that accounts for only 22 products. It is the free tier. 84 vendors advertise the tier that costs nothing and never print the price of the one that does. The opacity has moved from the enterprise sales call to the top of the funnel.
By category
Categories with fewer than 12 reviewed products are left out; a percentage drawn from eight products is a headline, not a measurement.
| Category | Reviewed | No figure | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-commerce | 21 | 13 | 62% |
| HR Software | 12 | 7 | 58% |
| Customer Service | 12 | 6 | 50% |
| Hosting | 51 | 25 | 49% |
| AI Tools | 33 | 16 | 48% |
| Productivity | 57 | 26 | 46% |
| Communication | 27 | 12 | 44% |
| Finance Tools | 16 | 7 | 44% |
| Developer Tools | 111 | 42 | 38% |
| Design | 35 | 13 | 37% |
| Marketing | 57 | 21 | 37% |
| CRM | 15 | 5 | 33% |
| Project Management | 21 | 6 | 29% |
E-commerce is the least forthcoming at 62% (13 of 21); Project Management the most, at 29%. The spread between the two is the finding worth arguing about: nothing about selling e-commerce software makes a price harder to print than selling project management software. It is a norm, not a constraint.
Method
- Population: 512 products in the ToolCompare catalogue. 40 excluded for having no dated evidence record, leaving 472.
- Source: the vendor's own pricing page, read by an editor, with the URL and the date recorded. Third-party reports, review sites and resellers were not used.
- "Figure found" means one of: a paid plan with a stated monthly amount, a stated starting price, or a product that is genuinely free. A published $0 is a published price, so free software counts as transparent rather than unknown.
- "No figure" means none of the above appeared in the page text, and is always recorded with one of the four reasons above.
- Window: pages were read between August and September 2026. Pricing pages change; each record carries its own read date so you can judge how stale it is.
The full ranking method for the rest of the site, including what our scores can and cannot support, is on the methodology page.
Take the data
The record behind every number on this page is downloadable, free, and licensed CC BY 4.0 — including commercially. One row per product: the classification, the reason, the date the evidence was read and how many sources back it.
GET https://toolcompare.net/api/pricing-transparency — CSV, 472 rows.
The underlying per-product pricing records, with every source URL and quoted line, are on the open dataset page.
Citation
ToolCompare, Pricing Transparency Index (version 2026-09-11). https://toolcompare.net/research/pricing-transparency — licensed CC BY 4.0.
If you publish something using this, we would like to see it — tell us. Corrections are welcome and get applied; this index is meant to be repeated, and a repeated measurement is only worth something if the first one was honest about its mistakes.