SupportVerdict

Methodology

Methodology & sources

Pricing is the moat — so here is exactly how we gather it, grade it, and decide what's trustworthy enough to publish.

AI pricing is hard to compare precisely because vendors make it hard. Our job is to do the digging and be transparent about how confident we are in each number. As of June 2026, our dataset covers 40 vendors, of which 29 are source-verified.

Where the data comes from

  • The vendor's own page first. Whenever a vendor publishes a price, that page is our primary source, and we record the date we checked it.
  • Cited third parties when a vendor hides pricing. Several vendors route pricing to a sales call or block automated access. There we rely on reputable, dated third-party breakdowns — and we say so.
  • The fact of opacity is itself data. When a vendor publishes no price (contact-sales-only), we record that, because it's a real signal for a buyer.

How we grade confidence

Every vendor carries one of three confidence flags:

  • High — verified on the vendor's own pricing page.
  • Medium — corroborated across reputable, dated third-party sources (used when the vendor doesn't publish the figure).
  • Low — a single source or an estimate we cannot stand behind.

The data gate

A vendor's profile is only indexed by search engines when we can stand behind its core pricing. If a price is unpublished, conflicting, or a single-source estimate, that profile is marked "estimated — not yet source-verified," set to no-index, and excluded from our sitemap. It still appears in our calculators and finder so the tools work across every vendor — but we won't present a figure we can't verify to a search engine as fact.

How our verdicts are formed

A verdict is editorial opinion based on the cited facts — billing model, real cost at typical volume, free tier, integrations, and known watch-outs. We weigh fit for a given buyer, never what a vendor pays us. Our monetization data has no commission field, so ranking by payout is impossible by construction (see how we make money).

Keeping it current

AI pricing moves fast — in 2026 alone, HubSpot cut its per-resolution rate, Freshworks raised its session price several-fold, Zendesk acquired Forethought, and Drift was sunset. We review the dataset regularly and re-date each figure on review. If you find a price that's changed, email hello@supportverdict.com and we'll verify and update it.