{
 "schema_version": "1.0",
 "id": "accessibe",
 "name": "accessiBe",
 "research_status": "researched",
 "vendor_domain": "accessibe.com",
 "category": "IT & Productivity",
 "task": "Hosting & websites",
 "summary": "Web-accessibility widget (accessWidget) that scans a site every 24 hours and adjusts it in the browser — contrast, text sizing, keyboard hints — plus an accessibility statement. An aid, not WCAG conformance — for that the same vendor sells accessFlow (developer audits with ready-to-commit code fixes) and accessServices (VPATs, file remediation, expert audits), both quoted rather than priced publicly.",
 "best_for": "small and medium sites on ordinary CMS templates whose owners want a visible, cheap first step — contrast, text sizing, keyboard hints and an accessibility statement — and who understand they are buying an aid rather than conformance. The visit-based tiers are honest for that use: at 5,000 visits a month $490 a year is real money but not a project budget, and the Scale tier is the only one that includes any human testing at all",
 "skip_if": "you need actual WCAG conformance, are responding to a demand letter, or run a complex web app with custom components — in all three the money belongs in an audit and code fixes, and an overlay will not stand in for either. Skip it too if you are shopping on the promise of automatic compliance. That promise is what the FTC ordered the company to stop making without evidence, so treat any version of it you still see as a reason to look harder, not to buy",
 "honest_knock": "The thing you most need to know about this product is not on its pricing page, it is on the FTC’s. In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million to settle allegations that it misrepresented what accessWidget does; the Commission approved the order as final in April 2025. The FTC’s position was that accessiBe’s claim that its AI plug-in could make any website conform to WCAG was false, misleading or unsubstantiated — the widget did not make all customer sites WCAG-compliant. The order now bars the company from claiming its automated products make a site WCAG-compliant, or keep it compliant over time, unless it holds evidence to back that up. It also requires disclosing the domain limitations of those products before you incur a financial obligation.\n\nThere is a second finding that belongs on a page like this one. The FTC also alleged accessiBe formatted third-party articles and reviews so they read as independent opinion while failing to disclose the company’s material connections to those reviewers; the order requires it to disclose such connections from here on. We are an affiliate of accessiBe and we get paid if you sign up through our link — which is exactly the sort of connection that case was about, and exactly why it is stated here rather than in a footnote.\n\nWhat that means in practice: price this as a partial aid, not as legal cover. An overlay sits on top of a site and adjusts it in the browser. It cannot rewrite bad markup, fix an inaccessible custom component or make a keyboard trap go away, and no vendor’s automated layer can promise the conformance a real audit and remediation deliver. If you are buying to reduce the chance of a demand letter, buy the audit — the widget is not that. And the structural point behind the FTC order: accessWidget adjusts the page in the browser at load time rather than fixing the underlying markup, so the remediation exists only while the widget is being served. Stop paying and the site is exactly as accessible as it was before you started — which is the difference between renting a compliance layer and fixing a site.",
 "pricing": {
  "status": "public",
  "entry_price": "$59",
  "entry_price_terms": "Micro · per month for up to 5,000 monthly visits",
  "from_price_usd_month": 59.0,
  "plans": [
   {
    "name": "Micro",
    "price": "$59/month or $490/year",
    "includes": "Up to 5,000 visits/month; automated scans and fixes every 24 hours, accessibility statement and report, email plus live chat"
   },
   {
    "name": "Growth",
    "price": "$179/month or $1,490/year",
    "includes": "Up to 30,000 visits/month; adds dedicated case manager, Google Analytics integration, multi-account and team management, two-day response target"
   },
   {
    "name": "Scale",
    "price": "$479/month or $3,990/year",
    "includes": "Up to 100,000 visits/month; adds one hour with ADA attorney, yearly manual testing and validation, custom fixes"
   },
   {
    "name": "Enterprise",
    "price": "no published price",
    "includes": "Above 100,000 visits/month; adds 5 to 10 attorney hours, on-demand testing, SSO, dedicated account manager"
   }
  ],
  "plans_source": "summarised from pricing.notes; every plan name and amount appears verbatim in those notes",
  "notes": "(2026-09-10, read on their own pricing page) Four tiers for accessWidget, priced per monthly website visits, with both a monthly and a yearly rate on every tier: Micro $59/month or $490/year up to 5,000 visits a month, Growth $179/month or $1,490/year up to 30,000, Scale $479/month or $3,990/year up to 100,000, and Enterprise on quote above that. Micro covers automated scans and fixes every 24 hours, an accessibility statement and report, and email plus live chat. Growth adds a dedicated case manager, Google Analytics integration, multi-account and team management, and a two-day response target. Scale adds one hour with an ADA attorney, a yearly round of manual testing and validation by their experts, and custom fixes. Enterprise adds 5 to 10 attorney hours, on-demand testing, SSO and a dedicated account manager. The page opens on the yearly toggle, so $490 is the first figure a visitor sees; switching it to 'Billed monthly' shows the monthly rates above. Paying yearly saves about 30% against twelve monthly payments, which is what the toggle's own SAVE 30% label claims. No free plan and no trial is listed.",
  "verified_at": "2026-09-10",
  "source_url": null
 },
 "free_plan": false,
 "free_plan_evidence": null,
 "cost_traps": [],
 "compare_with": {
  "name": "UserWay or a manual WCAG audit",
  "why": "the two honest comparisons, and they are not the same choice. UserWay is the other large overlay vendor and the like-for-like alternative; we have not read its price list ourselves, so verify it rather than taking a number from a comparison site — including ours. The real comparison, though, is against paying an accessibility specialist to audit and fix the site. That costs more up front and produces no widget, but it is the only route that changes what a screen-reader user actually encounters and the only one that stands up if conformance is ever tested. Worth knowing before you look elsewhere for it: accessiBe sells that work itself, under two names the widget tiers above do not cover. accessFlow is the developer-side product — it crawls pages and user flows, hands back prioritised issues with code examples and auto-resolves the ones it can, with an IDE integration and an SDK for catching issues before production. accessServices is the human side: VPATs, PDF and document remediation, litigation support, expert audits and manual testing by testers with disabilities. Neither prints a price; both pages route you to a product tour or an expert call, so treat that cost as unknown until you have it in writing. Our widget figures here were re-read on 2026-09-10, the other two lines on their own pages on 2026-08-17."
 },
 "links": {
  "record": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/api/v1/products/accessibe.json",
  "review": "https://officesoftwaremarketplace.com/accessibe-review.html",
  "marketplace": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/marketplace/accessibe/",
  "vendor_site": "https://accessibe.com"
 },
 "purchase": {
  "seller": "the vendor",
  "how": "AIBuilder Marketplace does not sell this software. Sign up, start a trial or buy on the vendor's site.",
  "handoff_url": "https://try.accessibe.com/g102j14bqso5",
  "affiliate": true,
  "disclosure": "Where purchase.affiliate is true, purchase.handoff_url is an affiliate link: AIBuilder Marketplace may earn a commission at no extra cost to the buyer. Commission never changes what a record says, and products are not ranked by commission. Where it is false the link is the vendor's plain site."
 },
 "provenance": {
  "research": "hand-researched dossier, read on the vendor's own pages",
  "researched_since": "2026-07",
  "method": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/how-we-review/",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Credit 'AIBuilder Marketplace' with a link to https://aibuildermarketplace.com/atlas/.",
  "note": "A rebuild is not a new measurement: pricing.verified_at is the date that matters."
 },
 "cost": {
  "status": "not_yet",
  "engine": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/agents/#cost",
  "rules": null,
  "growth": null
 },
 "unknowns": [
  "Contract terms (cancellation, data export, data location, minimum seats) are not researched as separate fields; pricing.notes mentions them only where the vendor's pricing page does.",
  "No computable price rules yet: cost at a given team size cannot be calculated for this product."
 ],
 "task_evidence": {
  "structured_checks": [],
  "sessions": [
   {
    "source": "session",
    "product_name": "accessiBe",
    "product_id": "accessibe",
    "run_date": "2026-10-08",
    "what": "accessiBe's free accessScan scanner, not the paid accessWidget overlay this review prices. We built two versions of the same small landing page: one with 20 accessibility errors we placed on purpose and wrote down beforehand (missing page language and title, images without text alternatives, unlabelled form fields, low contrast, a skipped heading level, a table without header cells, a clickable div, a positive tabindex, an unlabelled iframe and more), and a twin with all 20 fixed. We scanned both and, as a reference, ran the free open-source checker axe-core 4.10.2 over the same two pages.",
    "findings": [
     "The verdict was right both ways. The broken page came back 'Non-compliant' with 14 issues (10 critical, 3 serious, 1 moderate); the fixed twin came back 'Accessible'.",
     "Of our 20 planted errors, the full report identified 7 correctly: the missing language, the empty title, the unlabelled button, the unlabelled iframe, aria-hidden on a link, the missing main landmark and the clickable div. An eighth, a link containing only an image without alt text, was flagged under the wrong diagnosis: the report called the image decorative and advised hiding it, which would leave the link with no name at all. axe-core found 13 of the same 20.",
     "What it missed: the form had an email field and a dropdown without labels and a phone field labelled only by its placeholder, and the report's Forms category read 0. It also missed the image with no alt text, the alt text that was a filename, the low-contrast text, the skipped heading level, the table without header cells and the positive tabindex. For the filename alt text and the 'click here' link the report has a rule, but marked it 'Relevant: No'.",
     "The report contradicts itself on the title: the empty <title> fails one rule ('titles aren't descriptive') and passes another ('missing page title'). It also flagged the correctly hidden icon inside our button and the page's <body> element.",
     "The scan itself is free, but the breakdown sits blurred behind a form. To see it you give your name and a business email and tick: 'I agree to enter into a contract with accessiBe under its Terms of Service, under which accessiBe will process my personal data for marketing purposes, for 6 months'. The same page says 'Always free'. The report arrived by email within a minute, with buttons to sign up and to install the widget.",
     "It would not scan W3C's own before-and-after accessibility demo ('The scanner doesn't have permission to access this URL'), which is why we used pages of our own.",
     "Not tested: accessWidget itself, any paid tier, accessFlow, multi-page scans and real sites. One page pair is a spot check of the free scanner, not a verdict on the product line."
    ],
    "not_tested": null,
    "report": null,
    "result": "reported",
    "note": "Findings as written up after the session; no pass/fail per task was scored.",
    "in_catalog": true
   }
  ]
 },
 "open_questions": [
  {
   "question_id": "accessibe:cancellation_terms",
   "key": "cancellation_terms",
   "question": "Can a customer cancel at any time, and what happens to an annual plan that is cancelled mid-term?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "accessibe:data_export",
   "key": "data_export",
   "question": "Which data can a customer export, in which formats, on which plans?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "accessibe:data_location",
   "key": "data_location",
   "question": "Where is customer data stored, and can a customer choose the region?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "accessibe:minimum_seats",
   "key": "minimum_seats",
   "question": "Is there a minimum number of seats or users on any plan?",
   "status": "open"
  }
 ],
 "vendor_answers": [],
 "agent_channels": {
  "vendor_mcp": {
   "what": "Server over accessFlow, their developer product: an AI assistant in the IDE can query the accessibility knowledgebase, get WCAG-aligned explanations, surface high-priority issues and propose code-level fixes. Shipped alongside an SDK for CI/CD scanning.",
   "plan": "Not stated in their own announcement.",
   "status": "Live",
   "source": "https://accessibe.com/blog/accessflows-sdk-and-mcp",
   "checked": "2026-07-28",
   "note": "The vendor's own MCP server, from our MCP research; it works with your own account at the vendor."
  },
  "agent_checkout": {
   "status": "not_found",
   "detail": "No explicit support for purchases by AI agents on the vendor's own pages.",
   "checked_at": "2026-10-07",
   "method": "homepage, /pricing and the pricing page we cite, read as plain HTML (no JavaScript) and searched for explicit support of purchases by AI agents: Agentic Commerce Protocol, Instant Checkout, Agent Payments Protocol, buy in ChatGPT, agentic checkout"
  }
 }
}