Glossary

Every term this site uses, in plain words. Where a term drives a number, the definition says exactly how.

Hosting prices

Intro price: The monthly price a host advertises for the first term. It usually requires paying the whole term upfront. On our tables it is the "Intro /mo" column, with the term underneath.
Term: The number of months you prepay to get the intro price: 12, 24, 36 or 48. We record the longest term offered, because that is where the lowest advertised price lives.
Renewal price: The monthly price after the first term ends. This is the number the site exists for. We record the exact sentence where the vendor states it and quote it on the company page.
Renewal cliff: The jump from intro to renewal, as a percentage of the intro price. +702% means the renewal is about 8 times the intro. The Index computes it off max(intro, $3) so a $0.99 teaser does not produce a silly percentage.
True cost, 3-year total: The cheapest purchasable way to cover the period you pick: the intro term at the intro price, then every remaining month at the renewal price. Divided by the months, it becomes the "per month average".
Covers full term (the dagger mark): Sometimes buying a longer term than you asked for is cheaper than renewing. When that is the cheapest path we show it, mark it with a dagger, and say how many months you actually bought.
Renewal unverified: We could not find the renewal price anywhere public. The calculator shows this instead of guessing, and the company is scored as opaque.

Email tool prices

Band, list-size tier: Email tools price by how many contacts you have, in steps: up to 500, up to 1,500, up to 2,500 and so on. Your bill is set by the band your count falls in.
Tier edge: The largest contact count in a band. One contact more moves you to the next band and the next price. We print the edge and the next price beside it.
Captured band, uncaptured slider: Some vendors show prices on a slider. We record only the bands we have actually seen on the page. When the bands between what we captured are missing, the row says so instead of ranking the only captured tier as cheapest.
Counting note: What the vendor counts as a contact. Some bill every address in the audience, including unsubscribed ones; some bill only active subscribers. It changes the band you land in.
Priced by send volume: Vendors that charge for emails sent rather than contacts held. They are listed separately and never mixed into the contact-count tables.

The Enshittification Index

Score: 0 to 100, the sum of four parts: cliff (up to 40), dated hikes (up to 30), free-tier shrinkage (up to 15) and opacity (up to 15). The formula is on the Index page and the inputs are downloadable.
Score bands: 0 to 19 clean record, 20 to 39 mild, 40 to 59 elevated, 60 to 79 heavy, 80 to 100 severe. Heavy and severe are reachable only with at least one dated incident; arithmetic on a cliff alone cannot get there.
Printed on the pricing page: Whether the renewal price appears on the pricing page itself, not only in the cart or a help article. When it does, the cliff points are halved: a disclosed cliff is a discount with a visible end date, and the surprise is the harm.
Opacity flag: Renewal price visible only at checkout (8 points), absent from the pricing page (4), or middle tiers priced only through "contact sales" (3). Removing a previously published price keeps its last known value on our tables and adds the flag.
Dated incident: A price hike or a free-tier cut with a date and a source we can show: an archived copy of the pricing page or the vendor's own announcement. Incidents fade with a 24-month half-life.
Confirmed change: A price movement our daily check has seen on two separate days. One-day flaps are never published and never score.
Receipt: The source URL for a number and, where we have saved one, the Internet Archive copy of that page on that date.
Honor roll: Companies with a cliff of 25% or less, zero dated incidents, zero opacity flags and a published renewal price. Recommendation boxes only ever show honor-roll companies, ordered by score.
Observed since: The date our daily tracking of that company began. A low score for a company we met last week means no documented incidents in our window, nothing more.
Baseline Edition: The first edition of the Index, published while our own history is days old. Scores are restated in dated monthly editions as history accrues.

About this site

Affiliate link: A "Visit" button that pays us a commission if you buy. It is marked where it appears, it does not change your price, and it never changes which prices we show. How we make money.
Automatic check: The daily job that re-reads every pricing page. Company pages print its last result in plain words, including when a page needs a full browser or blocked the check.