Methodology
ListCost is a cited price database — not a review site. We do not invent prices, award stars, or run deliverability labs.
What we publish
- Free-plan contact and send limits from vendor pricing or help pages.
- Paid tier prices at fixed list sizes (500 → 100k) when we can read them from a public pricing page, pricing.md, or a dated secondary that cites those pages.
- Gotchas that change the bill (who counts as a contact, send multipliers, branding, automation gates).
What we refuse to do
- Guess a missing slider stop.
- Copy another affiliate blog’s table without a primary source.
- Present regional or promotional prices as universal USD truth.
How we verify paid prices
For tools with public contact-based calculators we capture dated headless Playwright screenshots and JSON under data/evidence/ (YYYY-MM-DD). We prefer regular / ongoing prices over first-month or annual promo rates. Volume-billed (Brevo) and seat+contact-pack (HubSpot) tools stay blank on the contact ladder.
How to read “unknown”
If a cell says unknown, the vendor page was JS-rendered, incomplete, or volume-based (e.g. Brevo). Open the official calculator. Our calculator greys those bars on purpose.
Affiliates
Outbound “Visit” buttons may use affiliate URLs once programs are approved. Until then they point at official sites with UTM tags. Commission never fills an empty cell. See affiliate disclosure.
Updates
Each tool page lists last_checked dates on sources. Reprices we know about land on pricing changes.