How we count plans on AI tool pricing pages

Jason T. · 2026-10-05

Source: New Site Radar's rising board monthly snapshot, AI-tool sites registered 2025+. Free 20-site sample; Pro shows every site.

New Site Radar reads the pricing page of every new AI tool site it tracks. On 2026-10-05 we had parsed price lists for 2,125 sites. That week we found that some of the prices we counted as plans were not plans at all. We checked the 52 sites on the August 2026 revenue board by hand. On 6 of them, the plan list contained prices that were not plans.

What we exclude

We no longer count:

Prices inside long prose, including FAQ answers and footnotes.
A line with three or more prices, which we treat as a rate list.
Ranges such as "$150–1,000+".
Amounts such as "$100K".
Prices after "save", "savings" or "their total".
Prices followed by an arrow or a multiplier such as "2.4×".
Anything under $1.
Sentences used as plan names.

Prices in comparison tables are now ignored too. Those exclusions address concrete mistakes from the manual review: competitor prices, per-unit rates from a usage calculator, savings lines and marketing sentences had entered plan lists. "Save $81" is a savings line, not a plan price. In a from-to comparison such as "$347 /mo → $19 /mo", the price followed by the arrow is excluded. These are rules for our reader. Pricing pages are written for people, not parsers.

When we hold a revenue estimate

The main plan price feeds the revenue estimates on our revenue board. If a site's main price moves more than 5 times between monthly snapshots, we hold its revenue estimate. We also keep it off the revenue board that month until we have checked the page. A dry run on current data held exactly 1 site. This safeguard also covers a problem that does not start with our reader: pages change on their own. One revenue-board site's pricing page now shows yearly totals labelled "/month", 12 times its earlier monthly price. The hold gives us a point at which to inspect the page rather than pass that change straight into the revenue board. The rule is documented on our methodology page, and the rates used for revenue estimates are in the revenue section.

Why usage-only pricing can show no public prices

One usage-only site now shows "No public prices found". Previously, we had made up a monthly price from its calculator. We removed that price. That distinction matters if you use scraped prices in a directory or research dataset.

What we corrected in monthly prices

On 2026-10-05, we found and fixed three reading errors. Two involved the way a price's unit was written:

A currency code between the price and unit, as in "$15 USD / month".
A bare unit word, as in "$ 15.92 month".

In both cases, a monthly price had been read as yearly. The third error involved card fees written as "3.3% + $0.30 per transaction". We re-read 557 sites that had a yearly plan or a plan under $1. The lowest monthly price changed on 26 of them. On 13 of those 26, it rose by about 12 times because a monthly price had been read as yearly.

What to do with the prices

For founders, check how your plans appear in our list against these exclusions. The format we read correctly is a plan card with one price, one unit and a plan name. Prices in FAQ prose and comparison tables are ignored. For directory editors and researchers, distinguish the lowest paid price from the main plan price. Both appear on each site's page, but the main price is the one that feeds revenue estimates. Crawl context matters too. We crawl from the same region as our production servers. A test re-crawl from another country returned euro prices on 3 sites and a Spanish-language page on 1. We built New Site Radar.

Free RSS: rising sample, 20-site monthly sample; just launched, AI tool sites registered in last 90 days; no traffic numbers.