SaaS price record: how it is read and dated
SaaS price record method: how each figure is read from a vendor pricing page, dated, quoted verbatim, and left gated when none is published.
Every comparison page on the internet quotes a price, and almost none of them tell you when they read it. That single omission is what makes most software comparisons useless within a quarter: the number was probably right once, nobody wrote down the day, and there is no way to tell whether it is right now.
This store keeps its prices in one place, the observatory, and this page describes how that record is made -- because a method you can read is the only reason to believe a figure.
The four rules of the record
Read it at the vendor, on a rendered page. Each figure is taken from the vendor's own pricing page as a browser renders it, not from a cached scrape and not from a third-party index. That distinction is not pedantry: pricing pages increasingly draw their digits with scripts, so what a plain fetch returns and what a customer sees are different documents.
Quote it verbatim, with the source link. The published wording sits beside the figure, so a reader can see whether per user meant per user per month or per user per year, and whether the discount was annual billing or a first-year promotion.
Date it. Every row carries the date it was verified. Re-verification runs on a quarterly cycle and whenever a change is reported, and the date column is what tells you how fresh any given row is.
Record a gate as a gate. A vendor who publishes no price is shown as quote-gated. Not estimated, not from about, not inferred from a review site. The absence of a published price is itself the record, and it is a useful fact.
The rule those four add up to is the one stated on the page itself: a number with no source does not render anywhere on this site.
Why the store's own prices are handled separately
The other half of a price record is your own prices, and the failure mode there is different: two pages of yours quoting different numbers for the same thing.
That is handled mechanically rather than by review. Where a product is also listed on an external marketplace, a maintenance script brings the on-site edition price into lockstep with the verified marketplace figure, so the checkout and the listing cannot disagree. It runs as a dry run by default and prints what it would change; committing is a separate, explicit step; and running it again when the prices already match does nothing at all.
What you can do with the record
The whole dataset downloads as CSV and as JSON, both openly licensed under Creative Commons attribution, and every vendor row has a stable anchor so a specific figure can be linked directly. There is a one-line badge you can embed on your own site that renders a verified price and stays current. Journalists, bloggers and anyone writing their own comparison are meant to cite it; that is what the licence is for.
If you want the analysis rather than the rows, the store's own report reads the same figures together: the state of self-hosted software in 2026.
How to read a row honestly
Check the date before the number. A stale row is a historical fact, not a current price.
Read the verbatim quote, not the summary. The caveats live there.
Notice the billing period. Annual-billing figures and monthly figures are not comparable without saying so.
Treat a gated vendor as gated. The honest conclusion from no published price is that you have to ask them, not that it is expensive or cheap.
Multiply by the number of people, then by the months. A per-seat figure only becomes a cost once you supply your own seat count and your own horizon.
The own-once column beside each row links the product that does the same job for a one-time price -- Slotly against the booking services, Vendra against the hosted tills, and so on down the table.
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Questions people ask
How often are the figures re-read? On a quarterly cycle, and additionally whenever a change is reported. The date on each row is the authority, not the cycle.
Why are some vendors shown with no price? Because they publish none. Recording that as quote-gated is more useful than an estimate, and an estimate presented as a price would be a fabrication.
Can I use these figures in my own writing? Yes. The dataset is published under a Creative Commons attribution licence, downloadable as CSV and JSON, with a one-line citation form on the page and stable anchors per row.
Where to look next
The record itself is the observatory, with the method printed at the top of the page and the machine-readable copies linked from it. For the analysis, read the state of self-hosted software in 2026. And the own-once side of any row is a product page: Slotly and Vendra are two of them. Prices are on the observatory; read them on the date shown there.