Pricing pages are designed to get you to the "Start free trial" button, not to tell you what you'll actually pay in month seven. For developer and AI tools especially, the headline number is often the least important thing on the page.

Here are seven things worth checking before you put a card in. They apply to newsletter platforms, site builders, AI writing tools, hosting, and pretty much anything billed monthly.

1. What is the unit you're actually paying for?

Every plan is priced on some unit: seats, subscribers, credits, words, API calls, builds, bandwidth, pageviews. Find it, then ask two questions:

What will that number be for me in 12 months, not today?

What happens when I cross the limit: a hard stop, an automatic upgrade, or overage charges?

A plan that's cheap at 500 subscribers or 10k words a month can be expensive at 5,000 or 100k. Run the numbers for where you expect to be, not where you are.

2. Monthly vs.…