PriceCensus

Methodology

How we track AI pricing changes, score confidence, and publish data.

What we track

PriceCensus monitors publicly available pricing pages for AI tools including foundation model APIs, coding assistants, image generation tools, writing aids, and productivity apps. We currently track >30 vendors across 4+ categories.

For each vendor we track:

  • Plan names and tiers
  • Prices per billing period (monthly, annual, usage-based)
  • Free tier availability and limits
  • Quotas, rate limits, and credit allocations
  • Trial information
  • Feature availability changes

How we detect changes

Our scraper runs every 6 hours and fetches each vendor's pricing page. We compute a content hash of the page — if unchanged since the last snapshot, we skip processing to avoid false positives.

When content changes, we run our extraction pipeline:

  1. Fetch — HTTP scraping (static) or headless browser (dynamic JS pages)
  2. Extract — AI-powered extraction converts raw HTML into structured plan data
  3. Diff — New plan data is compared against the current known state
  4. Classify — Change type and confidence score are assigned
  5. Review — Every detected change enters the review queue before publication

Confidence scoring

Every detected change receives a confidence score from 0 to 100%:

90–100%
Priority review. High-signal change with clear before/after values, but still held for human approval.
70–89%
Queued for review within 24h. Ambiguous signals that need verification.
0–69%
Manual review required before publishing. Conflicting signals or major page structure changes.

Factors that reduce confidence include: ambiguous currency or unit formatting, significant page structure changes from the previous snapshot, conflicting price signals on the same page, and AI extraction uncertainty flags.

Correction policy

We aim to be accurate, not just fast. If you spot an error in our data:

  • Material errors are reviewed the same day and marked visibly as corrected.
  • We do not silently delete materially wrong published events.
  • Each correction records when it was fixed and why.

Full handling details live on the corrections policy page.

Data freshness

Our pipeline checks each vendor every 6 hours. The last checked timestamp on each vendor page shows the most recent successful check. Published changes appear on the site only after review approval.

PriceCensus is an independent tracker. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or compensated by any of the vendors we track. All data is sourced from publicly available pricing pages. Prices may have changed since our last check — always verify at the vendor's official site before making purchasing decisions.