Pricing
What it tells you
Pricing pages move quietly — a new entry tier, a dropped price, a “most popular” badge shifted one column over — and those moves change where you stand without anyone telling you. Pricing is where you catch them. Each check reads the actual plans on each competitor’s pricing page and sets them beside yours, so you’re comparing real numbers, not a guess.
It comes down to a handful of plain readings, captured the same way for every rival and for you:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Tier structure | Each rival’s plans laid out — tier name, price, and who each one is aimed at. |
| Your price in the market | Where your headline price falls across the whole field’s range, from cheapest to enterprise. |
| Pricing model | Whether each rival charges tiered, flat, per-seat, or usage-based — and which way the market leans. |
| Trials and free plans | Who offers a free trial, how long it runs, and who has a free plan at all. |
| The sweeteners | Annual discounts, money-back windows, and any live promotion a rival is running. |
| Enterprise | Who has a custom or “contact sales” tier above their public prices. |
Nothing here is invented for you. Every price and plan name is something you could go read on the rival’s pricing page today — Pricing just gathers it in one place and tells you when it changes.
What a check looks like
A check visits each competitor’s pricing page, reads the plans the way a buyer would, and pulls out every tier with its price and who it’s pitched at, plus the trial, discount, and enterprise details around them. One run reads something like this:
Because the same pieces are pulled from every page the same way, the comparison lines up cleanly — you can see at a glance who’s cheap, who’s premium, who packages three tiers where you have one, and exactly where your own price lands against the pack.
The feature comparison
Beyond the raw prices, a check reads the terms around each plan and lays them out as one grid — so the things buyers actually weigh side by side end up side by side. This is where you see, at a glance, who’s undercutting you on the trial and who’s the only one without a free plan.
| Rival A | Rival B | Rival C | You | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | 14 days | — | 7 days | 14 days |
| Free plan | — | ✓ | — | — |
| Annual discount | 20% | — | 15% | — |
| Money-back | 30 days | — | — | 30 days |
| Enterprise tier | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pricing model | Tiered | Flat | Tiered | Flat |
Read down any column and you get one rival’s whole commercial posture; read across a row and you get the market’s convention on that one lever. When you’re the only column without a free plan, or the only one not discounting annual billing, that empty cell is the point.
Where your price sits
The heart of the dimension is placing your headline price across the whole field’s range — from the cheapest public plan to the most expensive, with custom and enterprise tiers marked at the top. You don’t just learn a number; you learn whether you’re the budget option, the premium one, or sitting right on the market average.
CompetLab works out the market average from the competitors it could read, marks your position against it, and names the highest- and lowest-priced plans in the field. When too few rivals have a readable price to make that average meaningful, it says so rather than comparing you against thin air — a small sample gets flagged instead of quietly reported as fact.
Tier structures, model, and count
A check keeps every rival’s plans intact — each tier’s name, its price, and the one-line description of who it’s for — so you can see not just what competitors charge but how they package it. Packaging is half the pricing game: the same total value split into one plan versus four lands very differently with a buyer.
| Rival | Plans | Tiers | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rival A | Starter · Growth · Scale | 3 | $19 – $99 + Custom |
| Rival B | Pro | 1 | $39 flat |
| Rival C | Basic · Team · Business · Enterprise | 4 | $15 – $149 + Custom |
| You | Standard | 1 | $69 flat |
Two reads come straight off this. First, your tier count against the market average — if rivals run 2.8 tiers on average and you sell a single plan, you’re leaving the “start cheap, grow into it” path on the table. Second, the pricing model the market leans on: CompetLab tallies how much of the field is tiered versus flat versus per-seat or usage-based, and tells you plainly when you’re in the minority — say, flat-rate in a market that’s mostly tiered.
The gaps it flags
On top of the raw comparison, each check calls out the places where you’re structurally out of step with the market — the gaps worth a decision, not just a data point. They come as a small, fixed set:
A price gap means your headline price sits far enough from the market to be worth a second look — you’ve drifted to the top or bottom of the range. A free-plan gap means rivals give buyers a free way in and you don’t. An enterprise gap means competitors publish a custom tier for big accounts and you’re capping out at a public price. A promotion alert flags a live discount a competitor is running right now — the kind of thing that’s easy to miss until a prospect brings it up on a call.
The price-positioning chart, the tiered-versus-flat distribution, and the plain-language gap callouts are rendered in the CompetLab app. The REST API and MCP tools return the pieces underneath — each rival’s plans and prices, the trial, discount, and enterprise details, the market average and your position against it, and the gap flags — so you can rebuild the same comparison in your own tools.
A trend, not a snapshot
A single check tells you what everyone charges today; the value builds when you watch it move. Because CompetLab runs on a schedule and keeps every result, Pricing becomes a running record of your market’s economics — the week a rival cut its entry tier, the month two competitors added a free plan, the quarter your price quietly went from mid-market to most expensive. Run History keeps each check with your typical price and the gap to the market average, so a pricing move is never just a one-off surprise you catch by accident.
Pricing runs on its own cadence, set independently of the other dimensions. Turning it on and choosing how often it checks are both covered in How monitoring works.
Work with it in code
Every quantitative piece here is available programmatically — the same data the dashboard renders.
FAQ
What is Pricing?
Pricing is one of CompetLab's five continuously monitored dimensions. It reads your competitors' pricing pages — the plans they sell, the price on each tier, who each tier is aimed at, their free trials and free plans, annual discounts, money-back windows, and enterprise options — and lines all of it up against yours. Every check pulls the live numbers off each rival's page, works out where your headline price falls across the whole market's range, and flags where you're structurally out of step. Because it's monitored, each check is stored as history, so you can watch a rival's prices shift over weeks and get an alert when something moves between checks rather than discovering it on a sales call.
Where does the pricing data come from?
Straight from each competitor's live pricing page — no survey, no manual entry. A check visits the page the way a buyer would, reads the plans, and extracts each tier's name and price, the description of who it's for, and the terms around it: trial length, free-plan availability, annual discount, money-back guarantee, and any enterprise or "contact sales" tier. Everything you see is something you could go verify on the rival's page the same day. That's the whole idea — it's a living record of what your market actually charges, gathered automatically and kept over time. When a competitor changes a price or restructures its tiers, the next check picks up the new numbers and marks them as a change against what you saw before.
How does it work out where my price sits in the market?
It reads the headline price of every competitor it can, then places yours across that whole range — from the cheapest public plan to the priciest, with custom and enterprise tiers marked at the top. You get a market average and a clear read on whether you're above it, below it, or sitting on it. Custom-priced enterprise tiers are shown as markers rather than folded into the average, since "contact sales" isn't a number you can average against. When too few rivals publish a readable price to make the average meaningful, CompetLab flags the small sample instead of reporting a shaky comparison as fact — so you can trust the market read when it's shown, and know to discount it when the field is thin.
What are the pricing gaps it flags?
Four, and each is a structural mismatch worth a decision rather than a raw number. A price gap means your headline price has drifted far enough from the market — to the top or the bottom — to be worth a second look. A free-plan gap means competitors offer a free way in and you don't. An enterprise gap means rivals publish a custom tier for large accounts while you cap out at a public price. And a promotion alert flags a discount a competitor is running right now. None of these is a verdict — being the premium option or having no free plan can be a deliberate, correct choice — they're prompts that surface the places your pricing sits apart from the field so you're deciding on purpose, not by default.
Does it track how competitors structure their tiers, not just the top price?
Yes — packaging is half of it. Each check keeps every rival's plans intact: the name of each tier, its price, and the one-line description of the customer it's pitched at. That lets you see how a competitor splits its value across plans — one flat price, or a ladder of four tiers that starts cheap and grows into enterprise. It also compares your tier count against the market average, so if rivals average three plans and you sell one, that shows up plainly. Two products can charge similar totals and still compete very differently depending on how they package it, and the tier breakdown is where that difference becomes visible.
How often does it check, and does it keep history?
Pricing runs on a schedule you set, on its own cadence, independently of the other dimensions — you can watch it closely or let it tick along, and changing the frequency never costs you past data. Every check is stored, so the dimension is really a running record of your market's economics over time: Run History keeps each check with your typical price and the gap to the market average, so a competitor's price cut or a new free plan shows up as a change against what the last check saw. That history is also what powers alerts — when a rival drops its entry tier or launches a promotion between checks, you hear about it. Frequency is set in the project's settings; see How monitoring works for the walkthrough.