How we verify
We'd rather say
we don't know.
Every figure in this directory is a claim about a real company. Here is exactly what we check, what each label means, and where we stop.
Where the data comes from
Profiles are compiled from companies’ own public product pages, then sent to the company to correct or remove. Category mappings — which American product a company stands in for — are our judgement, made from public product information, and each one carries a note saying where the fit breaks down.
A mapping is a claim that two products do the same job. It is not a claim of feature parity, and we try never to let it read as one.
The three pricing states
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| Not yet verified | We have no figure we can cite, so we publish none at all. This is the default. |
| From published list price | Read off the company's own public pricing page. The profile links that page and shows the date we read it. |
Right now 1 of 15 profiles carry a published figure. We’d rather leave a table empty than pad it with an estimate.
Canadian ownership and hosting
Two separate claims, checked separately. Canadian owned means the company is incorporated and controlled in Canada. Canadian hosted means customer data is resident in Canadian facilities. A company can be one without the other, and several American vendors offer Canadian regions — which is why ownership and residency are shown as different tags rather than blended into one badge.
Until we’ve seen documentation, a profile says self-declared. We’d rather label an unchecked claim than quietly present it as verified.
Keeping pricing current
Published list prices are re-checked weekly by an automated pipeline that reads each company’s pricing page, extracts the figure, and puts it through a decision gate before anything is written.
That pipeline can only ever produce a published list price — a cited, dated figure from the vendor’s own page, and only when a decision gate clears it. In its first full run it cleared nothing: one company’s figure was a promotional first-term rate and another was a bundled plan price, not the per-unit rate we compare on. Both would have produced a wrong comparison. Neither was published.
When we get it wrong
We will. If a profile misstates what your company does, or a price is out of date, or a mapping doesn’t hold — tell us and we’ll fix or remove it. Companies can ask to be delisted entirely, no questions.
Questions
- Why is so much pricing missing from the directory?
- Because we can't yet cite it. A figure appears only with a link to the page it came from and the date we read it. Until then it shows as not yet verified rather than as an estimate.
- What does 'self-declared' mean on a profile?
- The company told us something we haven't yet checked against documentation. It is labelled that way on the profile so you can weigh it accordingly.
- Does an entry mean the Canadian option is as good as the American one?
- No. An entry means the two products serve the same job. Every profile states where the fit is imperfect, because a substitution that drops a capability you depend on is not a saving.
See it in practice
Every profile shows its verification state in the open, including the ones where we've published nothing.