Field note
Two summaries of one pricing page, two different prices
A comparison table needed a competitor's published price. Reading about that page twice gave two answers, and the part they agreed on was the part neither page said.
By Eugene Romanov·Published
The short answer
A public pricing page was fetched twice to build a comparison table. The two summaries disagreed about the price, and both stated that a plan included five users. The page says every plan is for one user, with a separate per-seat fee. The figures were only correct once the page was opened in a browser and read.
SHT-02Field note
What this was for
The pricing page here carries a comparison against buying a seat-priced product, and a comparison is only worth reading if the other side of it is right. That meant one number from a competitor's own published page: what a team of ten actually pays. Nothing exotic, a public page anybody can open.
Two readings, two answers
The page was fetched and summarised twice. The two summaries did not agree on the price. That alone is a reason to stop, but the worse part was where they did agree: both said the mid plan included five users. The page does not say that anywhere, in any form. An invented detail that survives two independent readings looks like corroboration, and it is the opposite.
What the page actually says
Every plan on it carries the label "1 user". The per-seat price is not in the plan cards at all; it sits in a tooltip attached to that label. So the number that decides the whole comparison is the one a summary is least likely to carry, because it is not in the part of the page that looks like the price. Opening it in a browser took two minutes.
What the arithmetic turned into
On the published annual rate, ten people on the mid plan work out to $410 a month, because the plan covers one of them and the other nine are billed per seat at $29. Under the invented rule the same team looked far cheaper, and a comparison built on it would have been wrong in the direction that flatters whoever published it.
Where the number lives now
Competitor prices are in one file with the date they were read, the seat rule quoted word for word rather than paraphrased, and the ten-seat figure computed from the plan price rather than typed. Recomputing it is the difference between a number that can be checked and a number that has to be trusted. The date is published beside it: 16 September 2026.
The rule that came out of it
A figure that will be published is read from the page it comes from, rendered, by a person or a browser. A summary of a page is evidence that the page exists and nothing else. This is the same rule already used here for databases, where a migration is verified by asking the database what it has rather than by reading the file that was meant to change it.
If you are the one buying
Ask any vendor, and any agency quoting you a comparison, for the per-seat rule in the vendor's own words and the date it was read. Both of those are cheap to give and impossible to fake usefully. A comparison table with no date on it is a claim about a page that may have changed months ago, and the person who made it usually does not know either.
SHT-04FAQ
Questions this post answers.
- N01Is this an argument against using AI to research prices?
- No. It is an argument against publishing what it hands back. Finding the page, pulling the competitors together, laying the comparison out: all useful. The last step, where a specific figure goes into something a customer will read, is the step that has to touch the source.
- N02Why does the per-seat rule matter so much?
- Because it is the whole comparison at any real headcount. A price for one user tells you almost nothing about a crew of ten, and the difference between those two numbers is usually larger than the difference between the products. It is also the detail most often left out of a summary, because it is rarely printed beside the price.
- N03How would I check a comparison somebody showed me?
- Open the vendor's pricing page yourself and look for what the plan covers, not what it costs. If the page says one user and the table you were shown says five, the table is not describing that page. Then ask when it was read; a comparison with no date is not checkable at all.