Straight answers, SmartSuite to Tradify

SmartSuite is genuinely best for teams consolidating projects, CRM and operations into one flexible, database-driven work-management platform. Skip it if you need a lightweight to-do or a single-purpose tool — SmartSuite's breadth is wasted and its learning curve isn't worth it.

(re-verified 2026-08-17) No free plan — a 14-day trial of Professional with no credit card. Team is $15 per seat a month billed annually, or $20 billed monthly, with a minimum of 3 billable users, 5,000 records per solution and 50 GB of storage. Professional is $32 per seat annually, or $36 monthly, with a minimum of 5 billable users, 100,000 records and 100 GB. Enterprise is custom-priced. The minimums matter more than the rate: a three-person team on Team pays for three seats whether or not all three log in, and Professional cannot be bought for fewer than five. Always verify the live price.

It's a broad, do-everything work-management platform, so the power comes with a learning curve and a per-seat cost that adds up for bigger teams — a single source of truth if you commit, overkill if you just need a task list.

Smarty Discounts is genuinely best for Shopify merchants whose promotions have outgrown the native discount engine — capped amounts, a fixed amount that behaves correctly in several currencies, tiers by quantity, subtotal or weight, BXGY, gifts, mix-and-match — and who want to build them with rules rather than with a developer, targeting by product, customer, cart, market, country or company. Skip it if your promotions are ordinary percentage or fixed-amount codes, which Shopify's built-in discounts already do for free; or you want a long support and reliability record before a young app gets write access to the discounts in your checkout.

(read 2026-09-04 on apps.shopify.com/smarty-discount) Three tiers, all billed in USD and recurring every 30 days. Forever Free costs nothing, Lite is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, and Pro is $25.99 a month or $259.99 a year; the annual price on both paid tiers saves 17%, and both carry a 7-day free trial. What you are buying is capability, not volume: there is no order cap, no revenue meter and no surcharge tied to your Shopify plan anywhere in the block. Free covers product and order discounts with basic targeting and what the listing itself calls low support. Lite adds shipping and mix-and-match discounts, enhanced targeting and priority support. Pro unlocks every discount type, every targeting rule, active time periods and free shipping on a single rule. One detail in the plan table is worth reading twice, because it is unusual and it is in your favour: each tier gives unlimited discounts at its own level plus up to two at the level above. On Free you can build two Lite-grade discounts, on Lite two Pro-grade ones. That is a working trial of the next tier rather than a locked door, and it means you can prove the rule you actually need before you pay for it. Always verify the live price.

The evidence base is thin. The app launched on 14 January 2025 and carries six reviews as of 4 September 2026 — all five stars, but six is not a track record, and the vendor, Neezon, is a small developer in Ho Chi Minh City rather than a company with a support contract behind it. The listing is unusually candid about what that means at the bottom of the ladder: the free plan's own feature list says low support. Add to that what the app needs to do its job. The data-access panel says it reads customer data flagged as sensitive and can view and edit customers, products, discounts and the Online Store, which is the access any discount engine needs but is still broad. And because the ladder gates discount types rather than volume, the plan you land on is decided by the one rule you cannot live without: if the campaign you have in mind needs time-period scheduling or free shipping on a single rule, you are on Pro at $25.99 regardless of how few discounts you run.

SMTP.com is genuinely best for businesses and developers needing dependable high-deliverability transactional or bulk email via SMTP relay and API, with dedicated IPs at scale. Skip it if you send low volume and a free/cheap SMTP tier covers you, or you want a full marketing-email platform with templates and automation built in.

(price re-verified 2026-09-05) Fixed-volume plans, all billed monthly: Essential $25 (50,000 emails, shared IP), Starter $80 (100,000, dedicated IP begins here), Growth $300 (500,000), Business $500 (1,000,000). Above that, High Volume Senders is quote-only and starts at a minimum of 250 million emails a month, with a dedicated platform instance, dedicated IP and MTA and no shared mail queue. Reputation Defender and Insight Engine are optional add-ons at 20% of plan cost each, available on all plans. No free tier or published trial. Payment by card or PayPal. The site is operated by J2 Global Canada, a Ziff Davis company. Always verify the live price.

It's a veteran, reliable relay, but two honest notes. Pricing is volume-tiered, so a shared IP on the cheapest plan is fine for low volume while serious senders need the dedicated-IP tiers (and the IP warm-up discipline that comes with them). And the value-add features — reputation and verification — are metered on top at ~20% of plan cost, so the real bill is higher than the base tier. It's infrastructure, not a marketing suite; you bring the campaigns.

SMTP2GO is genuinely best for businesses that want dependable transactional/bulk sending via SMTP or API with human support and clear per-volume pricing. Skip it if you're inside a marketing platform that already sends for you, or you need advanced template/campaign tooling bundled in.

(read 2026-09-07 on smtp2go.com/pricing with the volume slider walked through all nine stops; the plan cards carry the amounts in their data-rate-monthly and data-rate-annual attributes) Free: 1,000 emails a month, 200 a day, 5 days of reporting, ticket support only (toll-free phone and live chat limited to 14 days), extra emails not permitted. Starter: $15/mo or $150/year for 10,000 (overage $1.20 per thousand); $30/mo or $300/year for 50,000 ($1 per thousand). Professional: $75/$750 for 100,000 ($0.85), $170/$1,700 for 250,000 ($0.70), $280/$2,800 for 500,000 ($0.60), $520/$5,200 for 1,000,000 ($0.50), and it adds a dedicated IP address and email-testing tools. Premier: custom, over 3,000,000 a month. Annual is exactly ten months' money at every step (their 'two months free'). All invoices are billed in US dollars; EUR, GBP, AUD and NZD are shown as approximations. 30-day money-back promise. Always verify the live price.

It's the pragmatic middle of email infrastructure: simpler and better-supported than the hyperscale APIs, cheaper than most, with genuinely useful reporting — but sending reputation is still yours to earn. A relay delivers what your domain deserves: without proper SPF/DKIM/DMARC and list hygiene, no provider saves you. Check the overage rate for your tier before you size up: on the 10,000 plan an extra thousand emails costs $1.20 against the $1.50 a thousand you already pay, and the 50,000 plan at $30 works out cheaper per email than Professional at $75.

SocialBee is genuinely best for solo marketers and small agencies who post to several networks on a schedule and want evergreen recycling rather than a queue that empties. Skip it if you post to one or two networks by hand and are happy doing it, because the value here is category-based recycling across many profiles and that only pays back at volume.

(2026-08-30, read on their own pricing page) Bootstrap $29/month ($290 a year, 16% off): 5 profiles, 1 workspace, 1 user. Accelerate $49/month ($490 a year): 10 profiles, 1 workspace, 1 user. Pro $99/month ($990 a year): 25 profiles, 5 workspaces, 3 users per workspace. Agency tiers billed monthly: Pro50 $179, Pro100 $329, Pro150 $449 for 50, 100 and 150 profiles, with 10, 20 and 30 workspaces and 5 users per workspace; billed yearly they are $149.20, $274.20 and $374.20 a month. Add-ons: 5 extra profiles $15/month or $150/year, an extra user $10/month or $100/year, an extra workspace $10/month or $100/year. AI generation is unlimited on every tier. Always verify the live price.

You are billed per social profile, not per person, and a profile is one brand account on one network. A single business posting to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X and TikTok has used the whole Bootstrap allowance before a second brand or a client exists. The second thing is that people cost extra on top: Bootstrap and Accelerate are single-user plans, so a two-person team on eight profiles is $49 plus $10, not $29. Count your profiles across every network first — that number, not your team size, decides the tier.

Softr is genuinely best for teams building internal tools, client portals or member apps on top of Airtable or Google Sheets without code. Skip it if you're building a public consumer app with unpredictable, high user counts — the per-user model works against you there.

(re-verified 2026-09-07) A free plan with unlimited apps, up to 3 builders, 5 app users, 5,000 database records, 500 workflow actions and 5 AI credits a month. Paid on yearly billing: Basic $19/month, Pro $99/month and Business $329/month, with Enterprise on custom limits; the pricing page opens on the Yearly tab and advertises two months off, so month-to-month costs more. App-user allowances are published per tier: Team 5 + Client 5 on Basic, Team 10 + Client 50 on Pro, Team 30 + Client 100 on Business, where Team users share a business email domain with one of your builders and everyone else counts as a Client user. Extra app users beyond the allowance start at $1/month on Pro and $2/month on Business. Extra builder seats are $5/month on Basic, $10 on Pro and $20 on Business, and builders can be added as app users free. Records run 50K / 500K / 1M and workflow actions 2.5K / 10K / 25K a month. Non-profits and education get a stated 50% discount. Refunds: in full within 14 days of a first monthly payment, 30 days of a first yearly one. Always verify the live price.

Builder seats are billed on top of the plan, and pricing counts builders and app users separately, so a public-facing app with a lot of end users gets expensive fast. Watch the overage rate as well as the plan: extra app users are $1 a month on Pro but $2 on Business, so the dearer plan meters growth at double the rate. It fits internal tools and client portals with a known audience, not an open signup.

Spiky.ai is genuinely best for sales and customer-facing teams that already run most conversations on video and want the coaching layer — talk-time, keyword tracking and call review — without buying a full revenue-intelligence platform. Skip it if your team's calls are mostly ad hoc or on the phone rather than video, or the meeting volume per rep sits well above 30 a month, in which case only the top tier fits and the cheaper plans are a false economy.

(re-verified 28 Aug 2026 on their own pricing page; unchanged since 31 Jul 2026) Read across both billing toggles. There is a genuine free tier, capped at 3 meetings per user per month. On annual billing Plus is $15, Pro $24 and Premium $40 per user per month; switch to monthly and the same three read $18, $29 and $49. Annual saves up to 18%. Trials need no card. Meeting allowances: 3 on Free, 30 on both Plus and Pro, unlimited on Premium. Always verify the live price.

The number to check first is the meeting cap, not the price. Plus and Pro both stop at 30 meetings per user per month, so the step from $15 to $24 buys features, not capacity. A rep taking two calls a day passes 30 in three weeks, which pushes you to Premium at $40 — nearly triple the entry price — for volume rather than capability. Price this from your team's actual call count and you will land on the right tier; price it from the feature table and you will not.

Spocket is genuinely best for dropshippers who want vetted US and EU suppliers with faster shipping and one-click store integration, prioritizing delivery speed over raw catalog size. Skip it if you want the widest possible catalog at the lowest sourcing cost (AliExpress-based tools fit), or your margins can't absorb both subscription and wholesale cost.

(re-verified 2026-09-07) Four monthly plans, metered on unique products: Starter $39.99 (25 products), Pro $59.99 (250 products, 25 premium), Empire $99.99 (10,000 / 10,000) and Unicorn $299.99 (25,000 / 25,000). Annual billing is advertised as eight months free and the annual rates are printed on the cards: Pro $24 a month, Empire $57 and Unicorn $79, with stated savings of $432, $516 and $2,563. Unicorn's two figures do not reconcile - $299.99 a month for a year less $79 a month for a year is $2,651.88, not $2,563. There is a 7-day trial and 0% transaction fee on every tier. Multiple-store support is listed on all plans, but the page states a separate subscription is required for each store. Unicorn carries the MOST POPULAR badge. Always verify the live price.

Spocket's pitch is faster-shipping US and EU suppliers, and that's real — but you still pay twice: the monthly subscription and the wholesale product cost, so margins depend on picking items with room to mark up. Catalog breadth is narrower than giant AliExpress-based tools (that's the trade for vetting and shipping speed), and the low Starter product cap pushes serious stores up to Pro quickly. It reduces, not removes, the usual dropshipping risks.

Stackable is genuinely best for shopify stores running several promotions at once — an order discount, free shipping and a collection deal — that want shoppers to redeem them with one code instead of choosing, or that want the progress type which raises the discount as the cart fills. Skip it if you run one promotion at a time, because Shopify's own combined discounts already cover that at no cost — or the checkout upsells are the part you actually want, since those only exist in the $99.99 tier here.

(prices read 2026-09-06 on apps.shopify.com/stackable-discounts) Two paid tiers, billed in USD every 30 days, and no free plan. Growth is $19.99 a month, or $199.99 a year with the annual saving the listing puts at 17%, and covers unlimited combined discounts; that plan carries the label 'For Non-Plus'. Unlimited is $99.99 a month, or $999.99 a year on the same 17%, and adds unlimited checkout upsells and unlimited linked discounts on top of the same combined discounts. Both tiers come with a 7-day free trial. The plan table lists no order caps, credit allowances or per-use charges, so what the tier costs is what the app costs. Always verify the live price.

The two halves of the pitch are priced five times apart. Discount stacking — order, collection and shipping discounts redeemed with a single code — is the $19.99 Growth plan, the one the listing labels 'For Non-Plus'. The checkout upsells and linked discounts the app leads with sit in the $99.99 Unlimited tier only, so a merchant who came for the upsells is reading $1,199.88 a year rather than $239.88. There is no free plan to settle whether the stacking alone lifts an order, so the seven-day trial is the entire evaluation. One more thing to check before you commit: the Website link on the listing, www.stkbl.app, now redirects to the documentation for Discount Kit — a different, pricier Optizio app — and that documentation does not mention Stackable anywhere (checked 6 September 2026). For an app that launched on 13 October 2020 and has collected 54 App Store reviews since, ask support where the current documentation lives before the trial clock starts.

Stamped is genuinely best for mid-market Shopify brands that want reviews and loyalty in one platform instead of juggling separate apps. Skip it if you're an early-stage store — the removed free plan and $199+/product pricing are steep before you have the volume to justify them.

(re-verified 2026-08-11, read on their own pricing page with the bundle toggle on and all three products ticked) There is no free plan, and the bill is driven by your monthly order volume rather than by a flat plan fee. Bundled, all three products came to about $18/month at the 200-order step and $79/month at 1,000 orders; $798/month is the figure at the 5,000-order step, not the price of the suite. Standalone, Reviews is around $23/month at 200 orders and $99 at 1,000. Plans include up to two domains and each additional store is $100/month after a first free month. Overage charges were dropped. A re-read on 12 August 2026 was not possible: the pricing page returns 403 to non-browser clients from both of our networks. Always verify the live price.

The $798/month figure that circulates for the full suite is the 5,000-order step, not an entry price — at 200 orders the same three-product bundle came to about $18/month when we read it. Read the order band, not the headline. What does bite is the shape: each product is its own subscription and the price steps hard with volume, so a good month raises the bill in several places at once, and a second storefront is another $100/month. Start with one product and price the step above the volume you actually expect.

Stampezee is genuinely best for local businesses (cafés, salons, retail) that want a simple digital stamp-card loyalty program starting free. Skip it if you need POS-integrated loyalty with CRM depth (bigger platforms exist), or your offer isn't repeat-visit shaped.

(read 2026-08-30 on stampezee.com/en/pricing from a US exit) Four tiers, all now named and priced on the public page. Stamp Start free: 1 branch, 1 stamp card, up to 100 customers or 100 stamps, whichever comes first. Stamp Lite $29.99/month: 2 branches, 3 stamp cards, unlimited customers and stamps, signup rewards, EzeeCodes, birthday/anniversary/referral automations. Stamp Pro $49.99: 3 branches, 6 cards, spend-based stamping, tiered and exclusive rewards, 4 push notifications. Stamp Elite $99.99: 10 branches, 12 cards, scratch-card campaigns, email marketing, 1 custom stamp card design, dedicated account manager. The page advertises 17% off on the annual term but does not print the annual amounts. StampEzee prices by region and the European rates are materially lower, not just relabelled: the same page read from the Netherlands gives EUR 19.99, 39.99 and 69.99. Note the entry tier's own contradiction: the plan card frames Stamp Start as a 14-day free trial, the comparison table on the same page lists it as Free with no time limit. Always verify the live price.

The category is honest and proven (digital stamp cards beat lost paper cards), and the platform is young with limited public pricing and review coverage — so start on the free plan, run one real campaign, and measure repeat-visit lift before paying. The deeper truth of loyalty programs: the mechanics are 10% of the outcome; a reward worth returning for is the other 90%.

StoreFAQ is genuinely best for small Shopify stores that want SEO-tagged FAQ pages with JSON-LD schema and a light AI chatbot for deflection, without standing up a full support stack. Skip it if you have real traffic, because the page-view meter charges you for the FAQ pages doing their job, or you need ticketing, agent workflows and multichannel support reporting.

(read 2026-08-21 on apps.shopify.com/storefaq) Four tiers, metered on FAQ page views and AI chatbot conversations rather than on the number of FAQs. Free: 100 FAQ page views, unlimited FAQs and FAQ groups, the AI chatbot and AI-written FAQs, 25 AI conversations for the lifetime of the account, AI training on up to 50 products, export and import, instant answer with live chat and standard support. Professional $7.99 a month: 500 FAQ page views, 50 AI conversations a month, training on 150 products, multilingual FAQs and dedicated support, with overage at $0.0159 per extra page view and $0.30 per extra AI conversation. Growth $14.99 a month: 2,000 FAQ page views, 100 AI conversations a month, 300 products, with overage at $0.0075 a view and $0.30 a conversation. Enterprise $49.99 a month or $479.90 a year, a 20% saving: unlimited FAQ page views, 500 AI conversations a month, 2,000 products, priority support and $0.30 per extra conversation. All charges are billed in USD and recur every 30 days. Developer Storeware, 124 Broadkill Rd #599, Milton, Delaware; the app launched 3 January 2024 and carries Shopify's “Built for Shopify” badge. Always verify the live price.

The meter is FAQ page views, and that is the thing this app exists to increase. You install it to get SEO-friendly FAQ pages that rank and get read; every read is a billable unit. The free plan stops at 100 views and Professional at 500, which a product-page FAQ on a store with any traffic burns through in days, and then it is $0.0159 a view. Unlimited views arrive only on the $49.99 tier. Success on the cheap plans costs you money, which is an odd shape for a pricing page and the first thing to model before you install. The AI allowance is the second meter and it is tight. Twenty-five conversations for the entire life of a free account, fifty a month at $7.99, a hundred at $14.99, and $0.30 each after that. Two hundred extra conversations in a month is $60, more than the top tier costs outright, so if the chatbot is the reason you are here, price the conversations rather than the subscription and jump straight to the tier that fits. And know the boundary of the tool. This builds FAQ content, schema and a light chat layer. It is not a helpdesk: no ticketing, no agent queues, no multichannel reporting. Anything a shopper asks that an FAQ cannot answer still lands in whatever inbox you had before.

StoreSEO is genuinely best for Shopify stores with a few hundred products and no in-house SEO help, who want metadata, schema, alt text and indexing handled in bulk and reported against Search Console. Skip it if you have fewer than 25 products, in which case the free tier is the whole product, or you expect an app to fix a demand problem rather than a metadata one.

(read 2026-08-19 on apps.shopify.com/storeseo) Free Forever covers 25 products with SEO scoring, 200 AI credits, 25 image optimisations, up to 5 tracked keywords, an LLMs.txt generator and Agents.md editor, an SEO migrator, alt-text optimisation and 24/7 chat support. Paid tiers are Lite $14.99, Essential $39.99 and Advanced $249.99 a month, each with a 7-day free trial. Lite covers 100 products, 500 image optimisations and 1,000 AI credits and adds one-click schema markup, instant indexing requests, Google Analytics and Search Console and automatic sitemap submission. Essential covers 250 products, 2,000 images and 5,000 credits. Advanced covers 10,000 products, 50,000 images, 50,000 credits and adds multilingual SEO. All charges are billed in USD and recur every 30 days. Worth knowing: storeseo.com sells a Growth plan at $99.99 a month (1,000 products, 5,000 images, 12,500 AI credits, 200 keywords) that does not appear on the App Store listing at all, and also sells credit top-ups from $10 for 5,000 credits and $50 for 25,000. Rating 5.0 from 674 App Store reviews. Developer Storeware, Milton, Delaware; the app launched 19 October 2021 and carries Shopify's “Built for Shopify” badge. Always verify the live price.

Know what an SEO app can and cannot do before you buy any tier. This one fixes the mechanical layer well — meta titles and descriptions in bulk, alt text, compressed images, JSON-LD, sitemaps, indexing requests — and none of that creates demand for products nobody is searching for. It is maintenance, not marketing, and on a catalogue of 25 products the free tier already does most of it. Two specifics worth a raised eyebrow. The pricing gap between Essential at $39.99 for 250 products and Advanced at $249.99 for 10,000 is filled by a $99.99 Growth plan. That plan lives on the vendor's own site but not on the App Store listing our link points to, which is a strange place to hide a tier. And the AEO/GEO features — the LLMs.txt generator, the Agents.md editor, the separate “agentic” ranking — are a bet, not a channel. No major search or AI vendor has committed to reading llms.txt, so treat those numbers as a hypothesis you are testing rather than traffic you are buying.

Storista is genuinely best for Shopify stores that already produce TikTok or Reels content and want it on the storefront as shoppable video, with the free tier's unlimited views making it cheap to test whether social video converts on your product pages at all. Skip it if you have no UGC or short-form pipeline to feed it — the widget displays content, it does not create any — or you want automatic product-to-video tagging without paying $49 a month for it.

(read 2026-08-23 on apps.shopify.com/storista-stories, listed as “Storista Shoppable Video UGC”) Four tiers. Free covers 10 videos with unlimited views, TikTok Shop and Shop app integration, GEO/SEO optimisation and the Carousel and Spotlight widgets, and it keeps Storista branding on the widget. Basic is $15 a month for 50 videos, unlimited views, basic analytics and videos on any page. Business is $49 a month for unlimited videos, AI Smart Tagging, advanced analytics and all widget types. Scale is $199 a month for Shopify Plus stores and adds VIP support and multiple stores. Every paid tier carries a 14-day free trial, all charges are billed in USD, and recurring and usage-based charges are billed every 30 days. The app is English-only, carries Shopify's “Built for Shopify” badge and works with Checkout, Shopify Admin, TikTok Shop, the Shop app, Instagram Reels, TikTok Videos, GemPages, Rebuy, Skio, Shogun and Subscriptions. Developer Storista LLC, Sheridan, Wyoming; the app launched on 19 February 2021 and had 49 reviews at a 5.0 average at the time of writing. Note that storista.io, the vendor's own domain, sells a different product on a different meter — AI-generated UGC video at roughly $1 to $4 a render, free to start with a $19 a month Pro plan — and not the widget ladder above. Always verify the live price.

The first thing to know is that the brand sells two different products, and the one you find by searching the name is not the one this link installs. storista.io is an AI UGC video generator priced per render, roughly $1 to $4 a video, free to start with a $19 a month Pro plan. The Shopify app is a shoppable-video widget priced at $0, $15, $49 and $199 a month. Same company, same name, unrelated ladders, and nothing on either page maps one to the other. If you arrive at a price expecting the other product, you will be wrong by a factor of ten in either direction. Second, read the headline against the pricing table. AI Smart Tagging is one of four bullets in the app's own pitch and one of the four features named in the listing summary. It appears on Business at $49 and above. On Free and Basic you tag products to videos yourself. Third, the rating deserves its detail. 5.0 from 49 reviews is excellent, and the breakdown is 47 five-star, one four-star and one one-star — so the round number is a rounding, not a perfect record. That is a small point, but it is the kind of thing worth checking on any app whose average sits exactly on the ceiling. Finally, the data access. The listing states the app views customer device and activity data and can view and edit customers, products, store analytics, custom data and Shopify admin. That is a wide grant for a widget that displays video, and it belongs in your processing register whatever you decide about the product.

Storylane is genuinely best for sales and marketing teams who show a product before a call and want to know which prospects clicked what — the free tier is genuinely usable for one demo. Skip it if you need more than one live demo but nowhere near 2,500 identified visitors a month, because that is exactly the gap the price ladder does not serve; a screen recording and a calendar link may do the job for less.

(2026-08-01, read on their own pricing page) Free $0: 1 seat, 1 published demo live at a time, unlimited views. Starter $50/month ($40 annual), 1 seat, extra seats $40 each, unlimited demos, de-anonymises 250 visitors/month. Growth $625/month ($500 annual), 5 seats, extra seats $100 each, 2,500 visitors/month. Premium $1,500/month ($1,200 annual), 10 seats, 10,000 visitors/month. Enterprise quote-only. Their RepX chat product is separate again, starting at $2,000/month for up to 10,000 monthly visitors. Always verify the live price.

The jump from Starter to Growth is $50 to $625 a month — twelve and a half times — and the free tier is capped at one live demo, so the moment you want a second demo published you are on the ladder. What is actually being sold at each step is visitor de-anonymisation: 250 a month on Starter, 2,500 on Growth, 10,000 on Premium. Price that against what you already pay a separate tool to do, because it is the meter that decides your tier, not the number of demos. Extra seats are charged on top at $40 to $100 each, which means a five-person sales team on Starter is not $50 a month, it is $210.

Streak is genuinely best for solo founders and small Gmail-native teams whose pipeline genuinely lives in email threads and who want zero context-switching. Skip it if your team needs shared process outside the inbox (a standalone CRM scales better), or you're price-sensitive — the Gmail convenience now costs full CRM money.

(price re-verified 2026-08-31 against the vendor's own pricing page) (2026) Pro $49/user/mo annual or $59 monthly; Pro+ $69 annual or $89 monthly; Enterprise $129 annual or $159 monthly — a flat 20% annual discount, with Enterprise available on annual billing only and only to teams of 10 or more. Everyone on a team must be on the same plan. AI credits are a second meter: 20 per user per month on Pro, 150 on Pro+, 500 on Enterprise, pooled across the team and expiring each period; top-ups run $100/mo for 1,000 credits up to $1,000/mo for 25,000. The free CRM tier was eliminated in 2024-25, but the free email tools remain — email and link tracking, snippets, Streak Share, a thread splitter, and mail merge at 50/day against 1,500/day on the paid plans. Pro+ has a 14-day free trial. Always verify the live price.

The pitch — CRM living inside Gmail — is also the ceiling: everything happens in the inbox, which power users love and growing teams outgrow (reporting, permissions, cross-team process). And note the trajectory: the free tier is gone and per-seat prices sit at real-CRM levels now, so the 'lightweight Gmail add-on' framing no longer matches the invoice. If the inbox is truly where your deals live, few tools feel this natural.

Success.co is genuinely best for leadership teams that already run on goals and want one place to set objectives, track KPIs and scorecards, and keep strategy execution on cadence. Skip it if your team won't commit to a regular goal-review rhythm (the software alone won't create it), or a simple shared doc already keeps you aligned.

(read 2026-08-21 in Success.co's own structured data on success.co/pricing and re-read there unchanged on 2026-09-08) There is a Free Forever plan at $0, and the paid product is tiered per user with the rate falling as the team grows. Monthly billing: $12 per user a month for 1-25 users, $11 for 26-75, $9 for 76-125, $7 for 126-250 and $6 for 251-1,000. Annual billing takes roughly a dollar to two off each step: $11, $10, $8, $6 and $5 per user a month paid annually. Two enterprise add-ons sit outside that ladder and are quoted on the page itself at $250 a month each: Single Sign-On (Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace or any SAML/OIDC provider) and Directory Sync via SCIM for automatic provisioning and de-provisioning. A 30-day free trial needs no credit card, and 501(c)(3) nonprofits get 50% off. Always verify the live price.

The ladder rewards size rather than commitment: moving from 25 to 26 users drops the rate a dollar, and the annual discount is worth about the same single dollar per user. So the number that decides your bill is headcount, not billing term — and at the small end, where most teams start, $12 a user is the least favourable rate on the whole page. The two capabilities a security team will ask for first, SSO and SCIM, are not in any plan: they are $250 a month each, which on a 20-person account doubles the bill.

Sunsama is genuinely best for people whose problem is deciding what to do today rather than tracking what exists — it pulls from your existing tools and forces a daily plan, which is the whole product. Skip it if you already plan your day and just want a task list, because that is free everywhere; also skip it for a team, since there is no team pricing and the per-person cost multiplies straight through.

(2026-08-30, re-read on their own pricing page from a US exit) The page gives two different numbers and it is worth knowing both. The plan card says $17 a month billed yearly, or $22 billed monthly, for the Pro plan, with unlimited usage and integrations; Enterprise is quote-only. The FAQ on the same page says Sunsama costs $25 a month per person, or $20 a month on yearly plans, and gives a worked example of $50 a month for two people. There is a free trial with no card required. The page also explains, unprompted, that they price at $25.00 rather than $24.99 because they consider the latter 'deceitful psychological trickery'. Their own llms.txt, read the same day, lists Pro at $17 per person a month billed yearly and $22 billed monthly, plus a 14-day trial at $0 with no card required — so the machine-readable file agrees with the plan card and not with the FAQ. Always verify the live price.

The pricing page contradicts itself: the plan card says $17 yearly and $22 monthly, the FAQ on the same page says $20 yearly and $25 monthly. One of those is stale, and until you know which, treat $25 as the number you might actually be charged. That is an odd thing to have to say about a company that goes out of its way on that same page to explain why it refuses to use $24.99 pricing — the transparency is real and so is the inconsistency. The other thing to be clear about is that this is per person with no team discount mentioned: two people is two subscriptions, and their own example says $50.

SupaEasy is genuinely best for Shopify merchants — especially non-Plus stores — who want custom discount, checkout, payment and shipping logic without hiring a developer, and above all those forced to migrate deprecated Shopify Scripts to Functions before the cutoff. Skip it if you only need a simple volume discount (a dedicated discount app is cheaper), you are comfortable writing Shopify Functions in code yourself, or you will not pay $99 a month to use the AI generator on a live store — the free plan runs on a dev store only.

(verified 2026-08-28 on apps.shopify.com/supaeasy and supaeasy.com/pricing) A free plan plus three paid monthly tiers, each with a 7-day trial. The catch is in the free plan: it works only on a development store, not a live one. Premium is $49 a month ($470 a year), Advanced is $99 a month ($950 a year) and Ultimate is $399 a month ($3,830 a year). The headline feature — the AI Functions Generator, which writes a function from a plain-language description — does not appear until Advanced at $99, alongside the Scripts Editor and Functions Wizard. So using SupaEasy the way it markets itself, on a live store, realistically starts at $99 a month. Always verify the live price.

Two things the marketing glosses over. First, the 'free' plan is development-stores only, so any live use is paid, and the AI generator that headlines the app is not in Premium ($49) but in Advanced ($99), possibly plus metered AI credits as an add-on — so the AI promise realistically costs $99+ a month. Second, the rating is suspiciously spotless — 5.0 across 205 reviews, all five-star — and the praise dwells on fast human support (Andrea, Fabio) more than on the no-code AI running unattended, which hints the tool can need hand-holding.

Superfiliate is genuinely best for e-commerce brands turning customers and creators into affiliates with branded co-branded storefronts — if the volume justifies a demo-quoted platform fee. Skip it if you're testing affiliate marketing for the first time — there is no self-serve entry and no published price, so the first step is a sales call about a program that is not yet producing.

(read 25 August 2026, re-checked 5 September 2026) Superfiliate publishes no price on its own site. superfiliate.com/pricing returns 404 with and without www, /llms.txt returns 404, there is no pricing item anywhere in the navigation, and the only commercial call to action is Book Demo. Their Shopify App Store listing (apps.shopify.com/superfiliate) publishes the shape rather than the amount: a single plan named Custom, 'Free to install. Additional charges may apply', the note that the app 'Requires an active Superfiliate subscription for app activation and use. Contact Superfiliate for plan details', and one hard fact — 'All charges are billed in USD.' So the free-to-install label covers the app, not the platform. Our dossier has carried a range of roughly $299 to $999 a month which we cannot trace to their site or to any dated reading; treat it as an unverified order of magnitude rather than a price, and ask for the number in writing on the demo call. Always verify the live price.

The price is the part you cannot check. Their pricing page returns 404 with and without www, the homepage carries no figure at all, and the only route to a number is a sales call — so the honest warning is not that it is expensive, but that you cannot compare it against anything until you have spoken to them. Ask for the figure in writing on that call, and ask what separates the ends of whatever range they quote. On fit rather than price: this is built for brands already running creator and affiliate programs, and it is overkill if you are testing your first affiliate offer.

SupportBee is genuinely best for small support teams working out of a shared email inbox who want assignment, internal comments and a knowledge base without dragging customers into a portal or learning a helpdesk suite. Skip it if your customers reach you on chat, phone or WhatsApp, or support and billing need separate queues with their own rules; this is one channel, one team and one knowledge base on both published plans.

(read 2026-08-27 on supportbee.com/pricing) Two plans, both priced per seat, and no free tier. Month to month, Startup is $20/seat/month and Enterprise is $25/seat/month. Switch the toggle to annual and the page shows a total of $204 per seat billed annually on Startup and $252 on Enterprise, a saving it advertises as 20 per cent, which works out at effective rates of 17 and 21 dollars a seat a month. Startup covers the shared inbox, snippets, filters, basic integrations, API access, unlimited email inboxes and tickets, customer satisfaction ratings, customer management, audit trails and one knowledge base with one team. Enterprise is described as everything in Startup plus five things: enterprise integrations, business hours, the customer portal, an audit log with data history, and portal access for customer groups. The trial is 14 days and the home page says no credit card is required. Billing runs through Stripe, you can switch between monthly and annual at any time with a prorated credit, and plan changes take effect immediately. Always verify the live price.

It is an email helpdesk and only an email helpdesk. There is no live chat, no phone, no WhatsApp and no social inbox, and the integration list confirms it: Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Linear, Notion, GitHub Issues, Pipedrive, Insightly, Capsule, Customer.io, QuickBooks, PostHog, Slack and webhooks are all places to push a ticket outward, not channels a customer can arrive on. Read the two published plans as printed and neither lifts the cap of one knowledge base and one team, even though the vendor's own FAQ describes teams as the way you mirror departments. Enterprise is listed as everything in Startup plus five named items, and more teams is not one of them. Watch the seat count too. The pricing FAQ defines users as everyone with access across all three permission levels, collaborators included, and the docs add a collaborator through the same add-a-user flow. So the invite-the-whole-company pitch runs through the same per-seat meter, and collaborator activity does not even show up in reports. And the two pages disagree about leaving: the pricing FAQ says you can cancel your subscription anytime, while the billing doc routes cancellation through contact us, which is the one billing action on that page that is not self service.

Surfer (SurferSEO) is genuinely best for content marketers, SEO specialists and agencies that need on-page optimization against live SERP data and want to start tracking how often they are cited in AI answers. Skip it if you are a solo blogger who needs keyword research rather than document-level optimization, or you cannot commit to a year — every listed rate assumes annual billing.

(read 2026-08-26 on surferseo.com/pricing over a US connection; first read 2026-08-25 from the Netherlands) Billed yearly: Discovery $49/mo, Standard $99/mo, Pro $182/mo and Peace of Mind $299/mo, with Enterprise at $999/mo and AI Search Analytics sold on its own at $158/mo. Every listed rate assumes the annual commitment. The page publishes what that commitment saves you — $120, $240, $444, $720 and $324 a year — and working those back gives monthly-billing rates of about $59, $119, $219, $359 and $185; Surfer does not print those figures itself, so treat them as arithmetic on theirs rather than a reading. Worth knowing if you are outside the US: we read this page from both sides and the numbers do not convert. A European is quoted €49 to €299 where an American is quoted $49 to $299, which at today's rate makes the same subscription materially more expensive in Europe. Always verify the live price.

Every tier quotes its monthly rate on annual billing, so the number you see is a year's commitment rather than a monthly one. The meter that actually forces an upgrade is documents: 120 to 360 optimizations depending on tier, which a working content team passes faster than it expects. And the AI-visibility tracking that the product now leads with is capped by prompt count per tier, so watching more of your market costs a step up rather than an add-on.

SurveyMonkey is genuinely best for teams that need research-grade survey logic (skip logic, randomisation, quotas) with compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2) and 200+ integrations. Skip it if you just need a simple form (Google Forms is free) or you're cost-sensitive with high response volumes — the overage fees add up.

(read 2026-09-08 in surveymonkey.com/pricing.md, the vendor's own machine-readable pricing reference, whose header dates the content 2026-08-31) Team plans are annual-only in practice: pricing.md lists Team Advantage Monthly and Team Premier Monthly as Canada-only and "currently not available to any user". The geography tables separate a core seat from each additional seat, and the per-user figure the pricing page advertises is the additional one. United States: Team Advantage Annual is $468 a year for the core seat plus $360 for every seat after it; Team Premier Annual is $1,668 plus $1,104. Euro storefronts carry the same shape at €432 plus €360 and €1,188 plus €900. Team plans require three or more users, Enterprise five or more on a custom quote. Overage above the included response limit is priced per storefront: $0.15 a response in dollar countries, €0.10 in euro countries, £0.15 in sterling. That included limit is stated nowhere in pricing.md, whose feature matrix marks responses "Unlimited" on every paid plan. Always verify the live price.

The free tier is a teaser. Response caps trigger $0.15-per-response overages that become a hidden cost on big studies. Branding and customisation are limited, and a lot of the good analytics and logic sit behind higher tiers.

SurveySparrow is genuinely best for teams that want engaging, conversational surveys and NPS with a polished respondent experience. Skip it if you just need a quick, occasional form — a free tool like Google Forms or Tally covers it without a subscription.

(re-verified 2026-08-17) The plan prices are not in the page itself — they render only after the plan selector loads, and neither our July nor our August 2026 capture retrieved an amount. What the page does publish is the discount structure: yearly billing saves up to 40%, students and education get 50% off, nonprofits 15%, and a startup programme offers $2,000 of credit for $500. Our earlier reading put paid survey plans at roughly $19-39/mo (Basic), Starter around $59 and Business around $149, with the CX and reputation suites quoted, billed quarterly or annually rather than monthly — treat those as indicative and take your figure from the selector. Always verify the live price.

The conversational-survey UX is the draw, but response limits on lower tiers and the 'contact sales' wall on advanced features (API, higher volume) make budgeting fiddly — and there's no true monthly billing.

Survicate is genuinely best for product and CX teams running always-on feedback — NPS, CSAT and in-app surveys — piped into the CRM and analytics stack they already use. Skip it if you just need an occasional one-off questionnaire (a simpler form tool covers that) or your response volume is huge — response-metered pricing punishes scale.

(read 2026-09-08 in the plan data embedded in survicate.com/pricing) A 10-day trial of all features, no card. Growth is metered on feedback rather than seats and is a ladder, not a single price: $56 a month for 100 responses and 500 data points, $114 for 250 and 1,000, $169 for 500 and 1,500, $229 for 1,000 and 2,000, and $289 for 1,500 and 2,500 — billed annually, with 10 user seats across 2 teams and one dashboard at every rung. Pro is $349 with a custom yearly response pool, advanced survey logic and 10 dashboards; Enterprise is $569. Starter is monthly-only and has its own ladder with an explicit overage rate: $89 for 100 responses at $0.89 for each one beyond, $179 for 250 at $0.59, $279 for 500 at $0.39. A response is counted per respondent, partial or complete; data points are new external feedback from integrations (calls, tickets, reviews) and exclude survey responses. Always verify the live price.

The plan is metered by response volume, not by surveys — a viral NPS month can push you a tier up, and the free plan's 30-day retention quietly deletes your history. Mind the billing asymmetry too: Starter is monthly-only while Growth and up expect an annual commitment.

Switcher Studio is genuinely best for creators, churches, events and small businesses that want multi-camera live production and streaming using iPhones and iPads they already own — no broadcast hardware. Skip it if you're on Windows, you need rock-solid wired production for high-stakes broadcasts, or a single-camera stream is all you'll ever need.

(read 2026-09-08 on switcherstudio.com/pricing) Studio is $65 a month month-to-month and $45 on annual billing; Suite is $99 month-to-month and $79 annually, discounted to $71 a month for a first year that then renews at $948. A Studio Seasonal tier is $55 a month on a three-month commitment — $165 for the block, which the page presents as a limited offer that continues at the same rate afterwards. Fourteen-day trial, no free plan. Monetisation carries no revenue share but $0.99 per transaction. The app runs on Mac and iOS; Android phones can be used as cameras, and there is no Windows version. Always verify the live price.

The app runs on Mac and iOS only — Android phones can join as cameras, but there is no Windows version — so the machine doing the switching has to be an Apple one. And wireless multi-cam is only as reliable as your venue's Wi-Fi; a shaky connection is the failure mode nobody markets. The monetization features (pay-per-view, subscriptions) are genuinely strong, but only matter if you're actually selling access.

Synthesia is genuinely best for teams making talking-head training, explainer and onboarding videos without cameras, actors or editing. Skip it if you need lots of video or cinematic, human-shot production — the minute caps and avatar style won't fit.

(re-verified 2026-08-17) Basic is free. Starter $29/mo billed monthly or $18/mo billed yearly; Creator $89/mo monthly or $64/mo yearly; Enterprise is custom with unlimited minutes. The page currently carries a NEW LOWER PRICES banner claiming plans from $18 a month, a 38% saving. Priced by video-minute credits, so the minute allowance rather than the sticker is what decides which plan you need, and a Studio Express-1 avatar is a paid add-on at $1,000 a year available only on annual plans. One caution we can document. The FAQ block lower down that same page states Starter costs $29 a month or $264 a year, and Creator $89 a month or $804 a year. That works out at $22 and $67 a month — not the $18 and $64 shown on the plan cards above it. Both readings were present in our July and August 2026 captures too, so check the figure at checkout rather than trusting either block. Always verify the live price.

The video-minute caps are tight — 10 min/mo on Starter goes fast when you iterate, and re-generating edits burns minutes. Fantastic for avatar-led training and explainers without a studio, but not for high-volume or cinematic production.

Tapita AI SEO Blog Builder is genuinely best for Shopify stores that want structured, product-linked blog drafts and a publishing schedule, and that will edit what comes out before it goes live. Skip it if you intend to bulk-publish AI articles unedited, or you are on Shopify Plus and can buy a full content tool for what the surcharge takes this to.

(read 2026-08-19 on apps.shopify.com/tapita-ai-seo-blog-builder) Free plan available: unlimited blog posts, 50 credits that do not recur, extra credits at $0.06 each, unlimited SEO audits, the drag-and-drop editor with autosave, author, product and table-of-contents blocks and 24/7 live chat. Pro is $9.99 a month or $101.89 a year, a 15% saving, and adds 250 AI credits a month, publish scheduling, content strategy suggestions, one-click multi-language AI translations, AI keyword suggestions, weekly idea suggestions and hands-on help fixing SEO issues. The headline price applies on Shopify Basic only: the listing states +$5 on the Grow plan, +$30 on Advanced and +$60 on Shopify Plus, so Pro is $14.99, $39.99 or $69.99 a month depending on which Shopify plan you are on. All charges are billed in USD and recur every 30 days. Rating 4.9 from 450 App Store reviews. Developer Tapita; the app launched 14 February 2022 and carries Shopify's “Built for Shopify” badge. Always verify the live price.

Publishing volume is the trap this tool makes cheap. It generates posts quickly and schedules them daily or weekly in bulk. And a Shopify blog filled with unedited AI articles is precisely the pattern search engines have spent the last two years demoting: the app lowers the cost of production, not the bar for ranking. Used the other way round, as a drafting and structuring tool for posts you actually edit, it is sensible and cheap. Two practical points on the price: the $9.99 headline holds only on Shopify Basic, and the surcharge takes it to $69.99 a month on Shopify Plus, which is the sort of detail that belongs in a headline rather than a footnote. And the listing never says how many of the 250 monthly credits a single post costs, so the allowance cannot be planned against until you ask.

Tapita SEO Optimizer is genuinely best for Shopify merchants on the Basic or Grow plan who want SEO audits, bulk metadata, image alt text and speed fixes out of one app instead of hiring a specialist. Skip it if you are on Shopify Advanced or Plus, where the same tier costs $30 to $60 a month more, or you need a published per-credit rate before you build a month of AI metadata around it.

(read 2026-08-21 on apps.shopify.com/google-seo-schema-meta-data) Three tiers. Free: SEO audit and LLMs.txt on basic pages, unlimited on-page SEO audit, essential JSON-LD schemas, and image compression 900 a month capped at 30 a day. Also bulk and AI metadata optimisation, bulk image alt text and file names for 50 products, one-click page speed and 24/7 support chat. Basic $9.99 a month or $101.88 a year, a 15% saving, adds SEO audit and LLMs.txt on main pages, auto image optimisation 100 a day, 100 AI metadata credits a month, full JSON-LD schemas, broken-link detection with auto-redirects and advanced speed features. Pro $39.99 a month or $408 a year adds all main pages, 500 images a day, 500 AI credits a month, higher speed capacity, full automation of image alt text and file names, unlimited keyword research and hands-on help fixing SEO and Search Console issues. Both paid tiers carry the same surcharge line, and it is the number that decides what this costs: +$5 on the Shopify Grow plan, +$30 on Advanced and +$60 on Shopify Plus. So Basic is $9.99, $14.99, $39.99 or $69.99, and Pro is $39.99, $44.99, $69.99 or $99.99, depending on which Shopify plan you are on. Extra audit pages and extra AI credits are billed on top and the listing does not print a per-credit rate. All charges are billed in USD and recur every 30 days. Developer Tapita, M5 Building, 91 Nguyen Chi Thanh, Hanoi; the app launched 15 March 2023 and carries Shopify's “Built for Shopify” badge. Always verify the live price.

The price on the listing is a Shopify-Basic price, and almost nobody reads the line underneath it. The same Pro plan is $39.99 on Shopify Basic, $44.99 on Grow, $69.99 on Advanced and $99.99 on Shopify Plus, because Tapita adds $5, $30 or $60 on top depending on your Shopify plan. That is a two-and-a-half-fold spread on identical software, and it is the single largest factor in what this app costs you. Work out which row you are on before you compare it to anything else. The second meter has no published rate at all. Basic gives you 100 AI metadata credits a month and Pro gives you 500, and beyond that the listing says only that more audit pages and more credits carry an extra charge. It does not say how much, and it does not say how many credits one product's metadata consumes. Tapita's own sister app publishes $0.06 a credit on its listing; this one publishes nothing, so you cannot price a month of AI metadata before you install. And the free tier is a demonstration rather than a plan: 50 products for bulk alt text and file names, 30 images a day, and the SEO audit and LLMs.txt limited to basic pages. Any real catalogue is on a paid tier within a week, which is fine as long as you know that going in.

Tapstitch is genuinely best for creators building a real apparel or streetwear brand who care about fabric, fit and how the product feels in hand. Skip it if you want the cheapest option or the widest catalogue — for pure margin and product breadth, traditional POD like Printify wins.

(re-verified 2026-08-17) No subscription and no monthly fee — you pay per item, production plus shipping, so there is no plan price to compare. Our monthly captures of the catalogue put item prices roughly between $2.99 and $23 depending on the blank. The honest catch is margin rather than fees. Printify's lower product and shipping costs mean noticeably higher profit per sale, while Tapstitch's premium heavyweight blanks — around 250 GSM tees and 350-380 GSM hoodies — sit at retail-grade prices, roughly $35-50 for a finished tee. Price the finished garment against your retail price, not the platform. Always verify the live price.

Printify is cheaper, higher-margin and has a far bigger catalogue — if you're optimising for profit per sale or product breadth, that's the real trade-off. Tapstitch earns its place when garment quality and brand feel matter more than squeezing the last point of margin.

Tax1099 is genuinely best for businesses and accountants who need to e-file 1099s, W-2s and related forms accurately and cheaply, especially seasonal or higher-volume filers. Skip it if you only file one or two forms a year (the IRS's own free options may suffice) or you want full bookkeeping rather than just the filing step.

(read 2026-09-08 on tax1099.com/tax-1099-efile-pricing) Filing is graduated volume pricing, not a flat rate that falls: each band is billed at its own rate and the bill is the sum across bands. The page works the example itself for 600 forms — the first 20 at $2.99, forms 21-150 at $2.30, forms 151-500 at $1.31 and the last 100 at $0.68, totalling $885.30, an average of $1.48 a form. Three eFiling plans: Essential is free, Teams (formerly eFile Plus) is $249 a year and adds multi-user access and 250 free TIN matches, and Scale (formerly Enterprise) is $349 a year and adds workflow, user and action management, API access and Notice Management (otherwise $199 a unit). TIN matching is not free on Essential: real-time is $1.00 a unit, within 24 hours $0.37, bulk $150 per 10,000 records — free on first use up to 10,000 records under one payer for Scale customers only. Other add-ons: eDelivery $0.25 a unit, print and mail $1.90 a form (plus a $1 rush fee in the last five days of the season through 2 February), foreign mail $4.99 a form, state reconciliation $4.99 a payer, and W-9/W-8 requests at $1.00 for one, $7.00 for 25, $45.00 for 200 and $95.00 for 1,000. Always verify the live price.

Per-form pricing is genuinely cheap for a handful of 1099s, but it's metered: TIN matching, W-9 requests, state filing and corrections can each carry their own charge. A business filing across many recipients and states should tally the add-ons, not just the headline per-form rate. It's a filing tool, not a bookkeeping system; it assumes your payee data is already clean.

TaxCycle is genuinely best for Canadian accountants and bookkeepers who prepare and e-file client returns and want fast, checked, CRA-integrated professional tax software. Skip it if you're an individual filing your own personal return (consumer software is far cheaper), or you're outside Canada.

Prices are published on www.taxcycle.com/pricing (read 9 September 2026, Canadian dollars before tax, per year, single user) and are currently sale prices: Tax Basics 2026 $1,600 (reg. $1,680) with additional users at $540; the Complete Tax Suite $2,625 (reg. $2,800) with extra users at $756; the Complete Tax Suite plus TaxFolder $2,752 (reg. $3,102) with extra users at $944. The page dates the discount — 'Sale Ends Sept 24' — and advertises a 12-month payment plan available only during the sale. Every module is also priced separately: TaxCycle T1 $618 (+$238/user), T2 $1,102 (+$248), T3 $532 (+$211), T5013 $516 (+$211), T2202 $558 (+$211), T3010 $268 (+$86), Forms $270 (+$27), and the slip modules T4/T4A, T5, T5018, NR4 and RL $268 each (+$27). TaxFolder is $375 (+$215) and licensed to the end of 2027; DoxCycle $280 (+$167); Data Mining a $242 site licence; Québec TP1 a $198 site licence. Three-user and ten-user tiers are listed on their own tabs. Always verify the live price.

This is professional preparer software priced for firms, not a consumer filing app: the cost only makes sense if you're preparing returns for clients at volume. The suites start at about CAD $1,600 a year for one user and each extra seat adds several hundred dollars, so a two- or three-person practice should budget the suite price plus seats, plus GST or HST, before comparing it with per-return alternatives.

Team Pulse is genuinely best for solo operators and small teams who want projects, tasks, chat AND a lightweight CRM pipeline with AI in one simple tool, and value the real free tier to start. Skip it if you need more than a handful of team members (seat caps climb the tiers fast), or you only need project management — dedicated PM tools give far more generous member limits.

Genuinely free tier: $0/mo for 1 member, 2 projects, unlimited collaborators, chat/tasks/files. Paid (billed annually): Starter $29/mo ($348/yr) — 1 member, 5 projects, NO pipelines; Growth $79/mo ($948/yr) — 3 members, 10 projects, 1 pipeline, AI; Pro $159/mo ($1,908/yr) — 10 members, 20 projects, 2 pipelines; top tier $299/mo ($3,588/yr) — 40 projects, 1,500 AI credits. Always verify the live price.

The tiers gate on TWO axes at once — member count and project/pipeline count — so you can hit a wall on either. The CRM pipeline is a big part of the pitch, but it doesn't exist below the $79 Growth plan (Free and Starter have none), and member limits are tight: Starter is a single seat, Growth just three. The listed rates also assume annual billing.

Teikametrics is genuinely best for Amazon and Walmart sellers spending enough on ads that a few points of efficiency covers the fee — under $10K a month the flat $149 is straightforward. Skip it if your ad spend is small or seasonal, because the flat fee at low spend is a large share of your budget and the percentage model at high spend needs modelling before you commit.

(2026-08-30, re-read on their own pricing page from a US exit) Essentials, for up to $10K a month in ad spend: $149 a month billed annually, or $179 billed monthly. Advanced, for over $10K a month in ad spend: custom pricing plus 3% of ad spend above $10K. Enterprise, for over $100K a month in ad spend: also custom pricing plus 3% of ad spend above $10K. A free trial and a free opportunity assessment are offered. Always verify the live price.

Read the Advanced tier carefully, because it is not a subscription — it is a subscription plus a percentage. Three per cent of ad spend above $10,000 means a seller spending $40,000 a month pays an extra $900 on top of whatever the custom base is, and that line scales with the thing the product is supposed to make more efficient. That is not automatically wrong — it aligns them with your growth — but it does mean your bill rises when your advertising does, and you should model it at your expected spend rather than your current one. The $10K threshold is the number to watch: crossing it changes the pricing model, not just the price.

Tellent is genuinely best for European scale-ups hiring continuously that want a collaborative ATS they can extend with HRIS and performance modules, and can put a sales call in the buying process. Skip it if you hire occasionally (job boards + a spreadsheet honestly suffice), or you want one all-in-one HR suite rather than modules.

Tellent publishes no prices. Its pricing page (read in a live browser on 9 September 2026, and separately in the served HTML) lists three ATS tiers for Recruitee — Start, Advance and Optimize — and the two Tellent HR modules, Manage (HRIS) and Grow (performance), and every one of them ends in 'Get a demo' rather than a figure; agencies are told to ask for a custom quote. Neither the rendered page nor the served HTML contains a single currency amount, and recruitee.com/pricing carries none either. What the page does state is scope: Start covers 5 active job posts and a single-page CareersHub; Advance adds unlimited posts, a multi-page branded careers site, ReferralsHub, 100 AI screening credits a month, 3 AI matching searches, workflow automations, candidate self-scheduling, offer-letter generation and up to 3 custom job fields; Optimize adds SSO, API support, a testing environment, requisition approval workflows, unlimited custom fields, 65 matching searches, onboarding support, a dedicated CSM and BI integrations. SSO, Texting, Journeys, AgencyHub and WhatsApp Hiring are optional add-ons on the lower tiers. A free trial is offered on every tier and needs only a company account; the page states no trial length. Always verify the live price.

Tellent's modular shape is genuinely useful — you can buy just the ATS, or just the HRIS — but nothing is priced in public: every tier on tellent.com/pricing ends in 'Get a demo' (read in a browser on 9 September 2026), and recruitee.com/pricing carries no figures either. Ask for Start, Advance and Optimize quoted together with their renewal prices, because you have no anchor to check a single number against. And as with every ATS, workflow fit — approval chains, careers-site needs, integrations with your assessment tools — matters more than the feature list; the free trial is enough to run one real vacancy through, so do that.

Tenable is genuinely best for security teams and IT-mature companies that need continuous, authoritative vulnerability scanning and can remediate what it finds. Skip it if you have no one to triage and fix findings — a managed security service or a lighter scanner fits a small team better.

(read 2026-08-30 on tenable.com/buy and the Nessus Essentials page) Nessus Essentials is free — a 30-day licence for 5 IPs, non-commercial only, with plugin updates delayed 30 days and no reporting, data export, compliance checks or support. Essentials Plus $199/year: 20 IPs, real-time plugin updates, basic PDF/HTML reporting, still non-commercial, free for verified students and instructors. Nessus Professional $4,790/year, $9,330.95 for two years, $13,637.54 for three — the first tier licensed for commercial use. Nessus Expert $6,790/year, $13,208.13 for two, $19,304.19 for three. Advanced Support (24x365 phone, email, community and chat) is a $400/year add-on on both. Training: $275 for a year of the Nessus Fundamentals course for one person, $385 with Nessus Advanced added. Cloud Tenable Vulnerability Management $3,500/year for 100 assets ($6,825 for two years, $9,975 for three); $3,700/year buys up to 250 assets online. Web App Scanning $6,790/year, or $3,578 for 5 FQDNs. Anything larger is a quote. Always verify the live price.

Note on how we link this one, updated 28 Jul 2026: between 21 and 28 July our partner link was dead — Tenable's shop subdomain stopped resolving, so we pointed the link at Tenable's own product page and earned nothing from it. Tenable confirmed on 28 July that the links are repaired; we re-tested them that day and the link now works again, lands on the same Nessus product page, and does pay us a commission. This is serious, enterprise-grade security tooling with an enterprise price and a learning curve — not a set-and-forget scanner. You need someone who can act on the findings, or you're paying for reports nobody reads.

TestGorilla is genuinely best for companies hiring steadily enough that a year of testing is cheaper than one bad hire, and who will actually use the library rather than writing their own questions. Skip it if you hire a few people a year — the annual commitment is the whole problem, and the free tier plus a well-designed take-home task covers occasional hiring.

(2026-08-30, re-read on their own pricing page from a US exit) Free $0 with 10 credits a month, no card needed, including preset custom questions and 1 full-access seat. Core $142/month on an annual commitment, $1,704 billed annually, with the full test library, analytics and 2 full-access seats; the Core card carries a credits selector and its sign-up link defaults to a 400-credit tier. Plus starts from $400/month with an annual commitment starting at $4,800, described as scaling with your hiring needs. The page also sets out what a credit buys: 0 for resume scoring, qualifying questions and custom questions, 1 per candidate for skill tests, video questions, ID verification or a talent-pool invite, and 2 per candidate for AI interviews. Prices are shown in USD with GBP, EUR, AUD and INR available. Always verify the live price.

Both paid tiers are annual-commitment only. Core is not $142 a month in any meaningful sense — it is $1,704 up front, and there is no monthly option to test it with real candidates first. That matters more here than in most categories, because hiring is lumpy: a company that hires in two bursts a year is paying for ten quiet months. Plus is worse to budget for, because it 'starts from' $400 and the page will not say what moves it. The free tier is credit-metered rather than feature-limited, which makes it a genuine trial — use it on a real vacancy before you sign a year.

TextExpander is genuinely best for support, clinical-admin and recruiting teams that need everyone sending identical approved wording — the shared library, permissions, auto-subscribe and SSO are what the paid tiers actually buy, and the SOC 2 and HIPAA-with-BAA posture is the one thing no free expander offers a compliance-bound team. Skip it if you are one person on a Mac with a couple of dozen fixed snippets. macOS Text Replacement is built in and free, Espanso is free and open source across all three desktop platforms, and TextExpander's own free plan now covers 5 active snippets. A subscription only starts earning its keep when you need fill-in fields, scripting, or a second person editing the same library.

(re-verified 2026-08-18 on the vendor's own pricing page; USD per user/month billed annually, excluding tax) The line-up was rebuilt since our July reading and it now starts at free. Free is $0 forever with no credit card, Pro $5 (billed annually at $60), Business $10 (billed annually at $120), Enterprise quoted. Annual billing is sold as two months free against paying monthly; the page does not print the monthly amounts next to the plans, so we do not quote them. The free plan is real but deliberately narrow: 5 active snippets out of an unlimited library, one snippet swap every two weeks, 3 teams, 5 team members and no snippet activity history at all. That history — what lets you see changes and restore deleted snippets — is 24 hours on Pro, 7 days on Business and unlimited only on Enterprise. Team members stay capped at 5 on Free and Pro; unlimited members start on Business, which is also the first tier with single sign-on (Google SSO on Business, all providers plus SCIM on Enterprise). A 30-day trial with full access to every feature and no credit card sits alongside the free plan. The page still carries an important pricing note for international customers, which we could not open on this reading, so treat the listed USD amounts as pre-tax. Always verify the live price.

On a Mac the operating system already does the basic job free: Apple's built-in Text Replacement syncs static snippets across your Apple devices, though Apple's own documentation notes it is not available in every app. And Espanso covers the power-user case free and open source on Mac, Windows and Linux. On Windows there is no built-in equivalent (contrary to a widely repeated claim, PowerToys has no text-expansion utility), so the case for paying is genuinely stronger there. Do not buy it for mobile. The vendor's own mobile page is an early-access signup form for Android and iOS betas, not a shipping product — even though the surrounding copy is written in the present tense. Then add the snippet activity history: nothing at all on the free plan, only 24 hours on the $5 Pro tier, 7 days on Business, and unlimited only on Enterprise. Add the vendor's own note that buyers in VAT/GST countries including the EU, UK and Australia may see an estimated 20% uplift on the listed USD price (read 21 July 2026). For one person with a few dozen fixed snippets, the honest answer is usually don't.

Textline is genuinely best for support and sales teams that already text customers from personal phones and need a shared, compliant inbox with a record of who said what. Skip it if you send marketing blasts rather than conversations — that is a different product and priced per message elsewhere; also skip it if your volume is low enough that a shared inbox on your existing helpdesk covers it.

(price re-verified 2026-08-31 against the vendor's own pricing page, read from a European exit) Amounts unchanged since 2026-08-01. Add-on message credits $0.03 each, bought in advance; backup message credits $0.04 each, Textline's automatic fallback when you run out mid-conversation. A $15 monthly 10DLC campaign fee applies if you use a 10DLC long code; the same page states that toll-free numbers do not carry a monthly registration fee. NEW since the last reading: the page now names three tiers with their inclusions but still no prices — Essentials (600 minimum included message credits a month, three agents, three-year conversation history), Pro (2,000 minimum credits, five agents, unlimited history, Salesforce, custom roles) and Enterprise (quote). HIPAA-compliant plans are charged an additional fee. Note for future readers: the per-feature tooltips on this page are unfilled placeholder copy, so the feature names carry no explanation. Always verify the live price.

Two costs are easy to miss and both are monthly. The credit system has two rates: $0.03 for credits you buy deliberately and $0.04 for backup credits that fire automatically when you run out — a 33% premium for not noticing. And a $15 monthly 10DLC campaign fee appears on your bill if you use a 10DLC long code, charged by the carrier registry rather than by Textline, so no plan removes it; the same page notes that toll-free numbers carry no monthly registration fee, so the number type is the lever, not the tier. Plan prices are still not published — the page names Essentials, Pro and Enterprise and what they include, but no dollar figures.

TheTop is genuinely best for professionals and small-business owners who lose the first hour of the day triaging Gmail and a calendar, and want one ranked brief instead of five open tabs. Skip it if your day runs through Slack, a CRM, a ticket queue or a project tracker — the integration list does not reach them, and a brief built from email and calendar alone will miss what actually moved.

(re-verified 10 September 2026 on thetop.com/pricing) One plan. Pro is $8 a month, month to month with no contract, and switching the billing toggle to yearly prints $80 — about $6.67 a month, or two months off for committing a year. It covers adaptive memory and learning, five brief refreshes a day, automatic data enrichment, quick actions and smart reply, and five connected data sources. Every account opens with a seven-day free trial of Pro, with no card charged during it. The home page labels $8 the "only plan" and prices it deliberately against the $20 to $30 it says most AI assistants charge. The pricing page shows no free tier, although its own FAQ still answers a question about starting on Free and upgrading later — so read "free" here as the trial until the vendor says otherwise. Always verify the live price.

Everything sits on one $8 plan, so the question is not which tier to buy but whether the caps on that plan fit your day. Five connected data sources and five brief refreshes a day are the limits, and there is no tier above them to grow into — outrun either and the published price list has no answer for you. Out of the box the reach is your calendar and your inbox through Google or Microsoft, plus news feeds. Anything else in your stack — Slack, a CRM, a ticket queue, a project tracker — sits outside the brief, and no amount of AI ranking repairs a missing source. And the FAQ still describes a Free plan the pricing page does not show. Ask before you count on sitting on one; what exists today is a seven-day trial of the only plan there is.

Thordata is genuinely best for data teams scraping at scale — price intelligence, SERP tracking, AI-training data — who want proxy infrastructure plus ready-made scraping APIs at aggressive per-unit rates. Skip it if you need predictable flat pricing, or your use case skirts site terms — residential proxying carries compliance questions no discount fixes.

(price re-verified 2026-09-01 against the vendor's own pricing page) (2026) Usage-metered, with free trials on the APIs. Every advertised "from" rate is the largest package on its ladder: residential $0.65/GB at 5,000 GB ($3,250) against $2.00/GB at 1 GB, $1.50 at 50 GB and $0.80 at 350 GB; mobile $2.20/GB at 500 GB against $5.00 at 1 GB; SERP API $0.70 per 1K at 1M responses against $1.20 at 15K; Web Scraper API $0.50 per 1K at 3M against $1.00 at 30K; Web Unlocker $1.00 per 1K at 200K against $1.30 at 10K; Scraping Browser $2.50/GB at 500 GB against $5.00 at 1 GB. Static ISP and datacenter proxies advertise $0.75/IP against a $1.50 list, while the ISP packages themselves list at $1.50 and $4.50 an IP. Always verify the live price.

Everything is a meter — per GB, per IP, per 1K responses — so the bill scales with usage. And every rate the site advertises is the largest package on its ladder: $0.65 a GB means buying 5,000 GB, while 1 GB of the same product costs $2.00. Budget at your own volume, not at the headline. Plus the category-wide caveat we'd give any residential-proxy vendor: those '100M+ real residential IPs' come from consumer devices, so check sourcing ethics and your target sites' terms before building on it.

Thryv is genuinely best for small service businesses — trades, salons, clinics — that currently run on a diary, a spreadsheet and a separate invoicing tool, and would genuinely retire all three. Skip it if you already have a CRM you like, because this is an all-in-one and its value is the bundle; buying it alongside what you have is paying twice for the overlap.

(read 2026-08-25 on their own pricing page) Starter is $99 a month and Signature $399 a month on monthly billing. Annual billing is stated to save 15%, which our 1 August reading put at $85 and $340, with Signature billed $4,068 a year. Amplify is custom-priced. A free trial is offered, and the growth add-ons sold alongside these plans are not priced on the page. Always verify the live price.

Two published tiers, $85 and $340, and nothing between them. That makes the decision unusually blunt: not which plan fits, but whether a fourfold step is worth taking all at once. Signature is billed annually at $4,068 — that is a year committed up front, and the monthly figure is a division rather than a payment option. Before that call, list which of the bundled parts you would otherwise buy separately: Thryv's case rests on replacing four or five tools, and if you only want two of them the arithmetic usually favours keeping them.

TicketTailor is genuinely best for event organizers with their own audience (venues, communities, creators) who want flat low per-ticket fees, full branding and no subscription. Skip it if you depend on marketplace discovery to sell tickets (Eventbrite's traffic is the fee you're paying for), or you run two events a year at tiny volume.

(re-verified 2026-09-09 on tickettailor.com/pricing with the currency switched to USD) No subscription and no contract: pay-as-you-sell $0.85 a ticket, or prepaid credits from $0.70 down to $0.34 depending on volume — 100 credits (the minimum) cost $70, 500 cost $300, 1,000 cost $520 and 20,000 cost $6,800. Credits carry no time limit. Free events are free up to 5,000 tickets a year, the first five paid tickets cost nothing, and charities, B Corps, PTAs and not-for-profits get 50% off, as do very low-priced tickets. Seated tickets cost two credits rather than one. Prices switch across GBP, EUR, USD, AUD and CAD. Stripe, PayPal or Square fees apply separately and Ticket Tailor never touches the payment. Note one contradiction in their own FAQ: one answer puts the free-ticket allowance at 5,000 a year, another at 2,000. Always verify the live price.

The fee honesty is the product — flat cents per ticket instead of percentage skims makes it dramatically cheaper than the big platforms on higher-priced tickets (a $0.30-0.85 fee on a $50 ticket vs a percentage is no contest). The trade: you bring your own audience. There's no discovery marketplace pushing your event, so if you rely on a platform's browsing traffic to sell out, the cheap fees won't fill seats.

Tidio is genuinely best for support teams that want an AI agent and a help desk from the same vendor and can size all three meters — billable conversations, Lyro AI conversations and Flows visitors — against their own volume before they commit, and Shopify, WordPress or Wix stores that want to run live chat at zero and treat the 50 free Lyro conversations as a measurement of whether the AI answers their questions at all. Skip it if you need the AI agent to keep answering past the first 50 conversations without paying, you cannot get the over-cap rate and the Plus usage rate quoted before signing, you want one per-seat price rather than three independent meters, or you are buying on the strength of the 67 percent resolution figure and need it as a commitment rather than an average.

(read 2026-08-24 on www.tidio.com/pricing/ with both billing columns clicked, and on www.tidio.com) The plan table opens on the annual column, so the first figures on the page are not what month-to-month costs. Starter is 24.17 a month billed annually against 29 paid monthly, Growth starts at 49.17 annually against 59 monthly, and the two stand-alone add-ons follow the same 20 percent step: the Lyro AI Agent from 32.50 annually against 39 monthly, Flows from 24.17 against 29. Plus is 300 a month in both columns and adds usage on top; Premium is contact-for-pricing. Tidio's own homepage quotes the higher, monthly number (“Paid plans from $29/mo, no surprise upgrades”), which makes the marketing page the more conservative of the two places you can read a price. The table rendered in euros on our reading while the same numerals appear with dollar signs on other retrievals of the same URL, so treat the figure rather than the symbol as the fact and confirm the currency at checkout. What you pay is decided by three separate meters, not by the plan name. The free plan carries 50 billable conversations, 100 Flows visitors reached and 50 Lyro AI conversations, and the comparison table's own footnote makes that last allowance a lifetime one rather than a monthly one. Starter covers 100 billable conversations, Growth starts at 250 and the table caps it at 2,000, both with 10 seats and a 7-day free trial. Lyro conversations are upgradable from 50 to 1,000 and Flows visitors from 2,000 to 100,000. Two things the page does not say: what a conversation over the cap costs, and what the “discounted usage rates” next to Plus's “+ monthly usage” actually are. On Plus that unquoted rate is the whole variable, because the 300 is only the entry fee. Always verify the live price.

The AI number on the homepage and the AI number on the pricing page do not agree, and the pricing page is the lower of the two. The homepage, read 24 August 2026, says Lyro “resolves 67% of conversations instantly” and repeats it as a statistic: 67% of conversations resolved instantly. The pricing table, read the same day, lists “Guaranteed 50% Lyro AI resolution rate” as a Premium feature — the most expensive tier on the page. So the figure the marketing quotes is 17 points above the figure the company is willing to guarantee, and the guarantee is only available if you talk to sales about the top plan. Both numbers can be true at once; a typical result and a contractual floor are different things. But it does mean that if you are buying on the strength of 67 percent, you are buying an average someone else achieved, not a commitment to you. Second, the plan table opens on annual billing. The headline 24.17 and 49.17 become 29 and 59 the moment you click Monthly, and the two add-ons move 32.50 to 39 and 24.17 to 29. Nothing is hidden — the toggle is right there and the annual column is honestly labelled “2 months free” — but the number you remember from the pricing page is about 20 percent below the number you pay unless you commit for a year. Tidio's own homepage quotes the monthly figure, so the two pages leave a buyer with two different first impressions of the same plan. Third, “Free plan forever” is true for the help desk and not for the AI. The free tier's 50 Lyro AI conversations are one-off: the comparison table footnote reads that your first 50 conversations are free (lifetime), and the same applies to the 100 Flows visitors. The live chat and ticketing side really does keep working at zero, but the AI agent that the whole homepage is built around stops after 50 conversations ever, which for a shop with any traffic is a matter of days. Read the free plan as a trial of Lyro inside a permanently free help desk, not as a free AI agent.

TiXel is genuinely best for Shopify merchants running Meta and TikTok ads who need more than the free channel apps give them — several pixels on one store, pixels scoped to individual products, or server-side Events API tracking alongside the browser pixel to recover events that ad-blockers and Safari strip. Skip it if you run one pixel for one brand, since Shopify's Meta and TikTok channels do that for nothing; or you cannot put real traffic through the store within three days, because that is the whole trial and the reported failure is a pixel that tracks nothing.

(read 2026-08-22 on apps.shopify.com/tixel) One paid plan and no ladder to climb. Unlimited Plan is $19.99 a month, or $119.94 a year at a stated 50% saving, and carries unlimited pixels, server-side Events API pixels, regular pixels via pixel code, pixels scoped to specific products, automatic event triggers with no manual event configuration, and online support. The trial is three days. The other tier, Development Stores, is free but only for development and partner stores, and billing activates on upgrade — the same shape as this developer's Blocky listing, where the advertised free plan is also development stores rather than a working free tier. Charges are in USD and recur every 30 days. Developer Effective Apps, 13 Max Nordau, Ashdod, Israel; the app launched 19 October 2020 and had 78 reviews at a 4.1 rating at the time of writing. Always verify the live price.

The 4.1 rating is the most useful number on this listing, but not for the reason an average usually is. The shape behind it is 67 five-star reviews, 4 four-star, none at three or two, and 7 one-star. Nothing sits in the middle. That is not a mediocre product; it is a binary one — it works immediately, or it installs cleanly and then tracks nothing at all. The one-star reviews describe the same failure in the same words: the pixel is set up by the instructions, no page views or add-to-carts ever arrive, and support does not reply. One reviewer reports being charged for a service they say never worked and being refused a refund, after three days of use. We cannot verify what happened in any individual account, but the consistency of the complaint is itself information. Set against that, the trial is three days. For a tracking tool that is short, because you need enough traffic through the store to see whether events actually land. Treat those three days as a test with a deadline, not a trial period.

TnC is genuinely best for Shopify merchants on a standard plan who need a recorded “I agree” gate before payment — for GDPR, an age gate, digital-goods withdrawal rules or chargeback defence — and who go to Advanced at $12.99 for the consent timestamp rather than stopping at the $7.99 headline. Skip it if you are on Shopify Plus and want the checkbox inside the real checkout page, where the plan you need is the $19.99 Plus tier the App Store listing does not show; you expected a free tier from the listing's badge, which covers development and partner stores only; or a checkbox on the cart and the express buttons is not the enforcement your legal requirement actually asks for.

(read 2026-08-25 and re-verified 2026-09-09 on apps.shopify.com/terms-and-conditions-checkbox, listed as “TnC: Terms and Conditions Box”, and in the vendor's own pricing article at www.effectify.help) The monthly ladder is $7.99, $12.99 and $14.99, and it has held there since the August rise: read on 24 August 2026 the same three plans, carrying the same feature lists, cost $6.99, $9.99 and $12.99. What moved between 25 August and 9 September is the annual price. It used to be $67.12, $109.12 and $125.92, roughly a 30% saving; the listing now shows $47.94, $77.94 and $89.94 and says “save 50%”. That is exactly six months' money for a year at every tier, where in August it was seven-tenths of the year, so the annual route got cheaper while the monthly one did not move at all. Four plans on the listing, and the free one is not for you. Development Stores is free and carries every Pro feature, but the listing states it is for development and partner stores only and that payment will be activated on upgrade — so the “Free plan available” line at the top of the listing describes a partner sandbox rather than a free tier for a store that takes orders. Basic is $7.99 a month or $47.94 a year and covers the AI terms-and-conditions checkbox with support for Buy It Now and express checkout buttons. Advanced is $12.99 a month or $77.94 a year and adds the consent date logged into the order's details plus the ability to show the checkbox for specific countries and products. Pro is $14.99 a month or $89.94 a year and adds newsletter and contact forms, translation of the checkbox into multiple languages, the checkbox in Shopify POS and an AI-powered policies generator. Every paid tier carries a 7-day free trial, and the listing states charges are billed in USD and recur every 30 days. The vendor's own pricing article, re-read on 9 September 2026, has not followed. It still prints the old annual rates of $67.12, $109.12 and $125.92, still puts the annual saving at approximately 30%, and still answers its own question “are there any hidden fees?” with “No. All pricing is transparent and listed above” — while the App Store listing, which is where the charge is actually raised, prints a different number for the same plan. It is also the only page where a fifth plan appears at all: a Plus Plan at $19.99 a month or $167.92 a year, for Shopify Plus merchants only, adding “the ability to show the checkbox in the actual Checkout page of your store”. The Plus Plan is the one monthly rate that has never moved, so the gap between the top listed plan and the hidden one is $5. The article also notes that uninstalling during an ongoing billing period still incurs that period's charge. Developer Effective Apps, trading as Effectify, at 13 Max Nordau, Ashdod, Israel; the app launched on 2 December 2019, carries Shopify's Built for Shopify badge, and stood at 550 listing reviews with a 4.9 average on 9 September 2026, up from 514 two weeks earlier. Always verify the live price.

Start with the badge at the top of the listing, because it is the one thing on this page that misleads. “Free plan available” is displayed twice, and the free plan is Development Stores — for development and partner stores only, with payment activated on upgrade. A store that takes real orders has no free tier here. It is the same shape as this developer's Blocky and TiXel listings, where the advertised free plan is also development stores rather than a working free tier, so read it as a house pattern rather than an oversight. Second, the App Store's pricing table is incomplete. The vendor's own help-centre article lists a Plus Plan at $19.99 a month, Shopify Plus only, and describes it as the plan that shows the checkbox in the actual checkout page. The App Store listing shows four plans and not that one. The same article answers its own hidden-fees question with “No. All pricing is transparent and listed above”, which is true of that article and not of the listing most buyers will read first. If you are on Plus and you want consent captured in checkout rather than in the cart, the price is two and a half times the headline. Third, the feature that makes the app defensible costs extra, and what it costs is not stable. Basic at $7.99 shows the checkbox; it does not record when anyone ticked it. Consent-date logging starts on Advanced at $12.99. Read a day earlier, on 24 August 2026, those same two plans were $6.99 and $9.99 with identical feature lists, so the step from checkbox to audit trail went from $3 to $5 overnight while the listing said nothing about it. For an app whose pitch is chargebacks and legal risk, an audit trail as a paid upgrade is worth knowing before you compare $7.99 against anything else. Fourth, be clear about what this can and cannot enforce. On a store that is not on Shopify Plus the checkbox lives in the cart and on express-checkout buttons, not inside Shopify's checkout, because Shopify does not open that page to apps below Plus. The listing is honest about the surfaces it does cover — cart drawers, Buy It Now, express checkout buttons, floating carts, PayPal and Apple Pay — but a shopper who reaches payment by another route has not passed a gate. Whether that is sufficient consent is a question for your own counsel rather than for an app listing. Finally, the data access. The listing states the app views device and activity data including geolocation, IP address, browser and operating system and browsing behaviour, and can view and edit customers, products, orders for the last 60 days, store analytics, web pixels and the Online Store script tags and theme. Geolocation is what the country targeting on Advanced and above runs on, so the scope is explicable, but an app installed for compliance reasons that itself processes IP addresses and browsing behaviour belongs in the same register as everything else you had to write down.

Todoist is genuinely best for individuals and small teams who want a fast, elegant task manager that gets out of the way. Skip it if you need full project management with timelines, workloads and dependencies — this is a to-do app, not a PM suite.

Free (up to 5 projects, one automatic reminder per task); Pro about $5/mo (annual, ~$7 monthly), Business about $8/user/mo (annual, ~$10 monthly) (2026). Always verify the live price.

The free plan's 5-project cap, and reminders that fire only at the moment a task comes due, push most serious users to Pro quickly — but Pro is genuinely cheap. It's a personal/team task manager, not a full project platform, so don't expect Gantt-level PM.

Toggl is genuinely best for freelancers, consultants and agencies that bill by the hour and want frictionless tracking with budgets, rates and profitability per project. Skip it if you need surveillance-style monitoring (screenshots, activity scoring — deliberately not Toggl's philosophy), or free-tier tracking already covers you.

(re-verified 2026-09-09 on toggl.com/track/pricing) Free is $0 for a limited number of users and the page calls it free forever. Starter is $9 per user a month billed annually and $12 monthly; Premium is $16 annually and $24 monthly; Enterprise is quoted. The introductory $14 Premium rate renewing at $18 that we recorded in August is gone — Premium now carries one annual price. The billing toggle advertises 'Annual (Save 33.3%)' and '4 months free', which holds exactly for Premium but not for Starter, where $12 to $9 is 25%. Trial is 30 days; Enterprise adds volume discounts on annual and multiple workspaces under one organisation. Always verify the live price.

Toggl's honesty problem is the good kind: the free tier is so capable that many teams never need to pay — the paid line is drawn exactly at 'do you bill clients' (budgets, rates, profitability). If you do, Starter earns itself fast; if you track time for personal discipline, resist the upgrade. Time tracking's real cost everywhere is adoption: the tool is frictionless, but the habit still has to be built.

Top Echelon is genuinely best for recruiting agencies and SMB staffing firms that want an applicant tracking system and CRM in one place, especially ones that would actually work split placements with other recruiters. Skip it if you are an in-house talent team hiring for your own company — this is built around agency and split-placement workflows, so you would carry a network you never use.

TE Recruit (the ATS and CRM) runs $75 per seat per month billed annually or $89 month-to-month on Standard, and $89 billed annually or $110 month-to-month on Professional. TE Network, the split-placement network, is priced per agency rather than per seat: $135 per month billed annually with the $350 startup fee waived, or $150 per month billed monthly plus a $350 one-time startup fee (2026). Always verify the live price.

Almost everything people shop for sits in Professional, not Standard: Smart-TE AI, automations, sequences, inbound email sync and API access are all one tier up, so Standard is a competent but plain ATS. The bigger thing to price honestly is that TE Recruit and TE Network are two separate subscriptions. The network is billed per agency on top of your seats, so "Top Echelon" can mean two bills. And taking the network month-to-month adds a $350 one-time startup fee that annual billing waives.

Tradify is genuinely best for electricians, plumbers, HVAC and other trades businesses that want quoting, scheduling, job tracking and invoicing from the field in one simple app. Skip it if you're a solo operator who invoices from a spreadsheet happily, or you need heavy project-management/accounting depth rather than trades job management.

Per user, per month, quoted in USD on their own pricing page and re-verified 2026-08-16: Lite $47, Pro $51 and Plus $61 per user, plus a Custom tier for large teams that is priced on request. The 14-day free trial includes all features. The Instant Website add-on is $12 a month. There is no free plan and no volume ladder published on the page — the per-user rate is flat within a plan. Always verify the live price.

Per-user pricing is honest and simple, but it means the cost scales linearly with headcount — a ten-person crew is a real monthly number, not the single-seat sticker. It's purpose-built for trades job management (quoting, scheduling, invoicing), so it's not a general project-management or accounting suite; you'll still run Xero or QuickBooks alongside it. For a trades business that's a feature, not a flaw.