The Pricing Pages That Lie to Robots

On 9 August 2026 we tried to read the pricing pages of seventeen AI SDR and outreach tools the way an AI assistant would: fetch the page, find the number, record where it came from. Six vendors publish two different numbers for the same thing on their own site. One publishes $3,750 a month on a URL its own homepage does not link, while /pricing returns a 404. And two of seventeen publish a price a machine can read at all.

Published 9 August 2026 · Last updated 9 August 2026 · Every page read on 9 August 2026 from a US IP address. This is the methodology half of our 17-tool AI SDR pricing survey. We restate the date at the top whenever a page below changes.

None of what follows is an accusation. Marketing pages are built for humans with cursors, they are rendered client-side because that is how modern sites are built, and A/B tests leave old grids alive by design. Every one of these is a reasonable local decision. The finding is what they add up to when the reader is not a human: a category whose prices cannot be read reliably by the thing that increasingly does the reading.

Six vendors that disagree with themselves

Same site, same day, same page in most cases. A human scanning for the price reads one of the two numbers and moves on. A machine reads both and has no way to pick.

Vendor	Says one thing	And another
Lemlist	The Email plan card: "Unlimited users"	The comparison table further down the same page: "From $55 /user /mo"
Reply.io	Annual Multichannel card: 10 mailboxes. Agency: $210	Monthly card and comparison table: 5 mailboxes per user. Agency in the table footer: $166
Clay	Launch plan card: "3K data credits/mo"	The FAQ on that same page: "2,500 Data Credits"
Smartlead	Pricing page: 500,000 sends	Its own llms.txt — the file written for machines: 510,000
Instantly	Hypergrowth: 125,000 emails a month. Supersonic: $197 monthly	The equivalent Scale tier under the Bundles tab: 100,000. Supersonic annual: $87.30 — a figure its own stated 20% discount cannot produce from $197
Apollo	The billing selector: "Save 24%"	No published pair of prices on the page yields 24%. The real gaps are 17% and 20%

Individually these are typos and stale cells. Collectively they mean that for six of seventeen vendors, "what does this plan include" has no single answer on the vendor's own domain.

The price on the URL nobody links

11x publishes $3,750 a month, annual commitment mandatory — $45,000 a year. That is real, official, and stated plainly. It sits at /products/alice/pricing. The conventional path, /pricing, returns a 404, and the homepage does not link the page that has the number on it.

So the most transparent thing 11x does — putting an enterprise price in public, which almost nobody at that price point does — is invisible to anything that navigates by convention or by following links from the homepage. Meanwhile the third-party record fills the space: Vendr reports a $55,050 median across real transactions, and the ambient web repeats $36k, $45k, $60k and $90k a year depending on which content farm you land on. The vendor published the answer. The answer just is not reachable.

Three grids running at once

useArtemis is the clearest case in the panel, because all three pages are live and official:

• /pricing, linked in the navigation: $69/month. This plan cannot send anything. It is enrichment only.
• /upgrade, linked from nowhere in the nav: $99/month. Unlimited email sending plus LinkedIn automation. This is the product most visitors think they are buying at $69.
• /upgradeold, a legacy grid still served. It is the only page that says "per user/month" and the only one that quotes the annual discount as 20%. It prices Enterprise in €259 while every other number across all three pages is in dollars — from a company based in Lyon that never labels its currency anywhere else.

An agent asked "how much is useArtemis" will answer $69 with total confidence, because that is the page the site itself points at. The answer is officially published and materially wrong for anyone who wants to send a message.

The markup that serves a false number

La Growth Machine's pricing is rendered client-side. The HTML that comes back from a plain fetch contains fallback values: 60 / 120 / 120. The real Ultimate tier is €180 monthly, €150 annual. The correct numbers exist only inside the page's JavaScript bundle.

Any robot that reads the served markup reports Ultimate at €120. Several comparison sites publish exactly that. So did our own first pass at this research — we caught it, corrected it, and are stating it here because the correction is the interesting part. The gap between a fetch and a render is now a factor that decides what gets published about a company.

Waalaxy has a quieter version of the same problem. The served HTML shows the annual toggle in a selected state next to numbers that two independent third-party sources identify as the monthly prices, and the vendor never labels the billing cycle next to the figure itself. Its comparison table also gives Advanced 25 Email Finder credits a month in one render and 500 in another. It advertises a −50% annual discount and publishes the discounted amount nowhere. Every price in that paragraph is officially published. None of them is unambiguous.

Two out of seventeen

Reply.io publishes reply-io-pricing.txt: a plain-text price file, addressed to whatever reads it, carrying its own last-modified date — 30 July 2026 when we read it. Smartlead publishes an llms.txt. That is the entire list. Two of seventeen.

And one of the two contradicts its own website inside the file: Smartlead's pricing page says 500,000 sends, its llms.txt says 510,000. Writing a file for machines is not the same as keeping it true.

Lemlist is the near-miss worth naming, because it shows the gap is about priorities rather than awareness: it maintains an /ai-info page and a /claude-skills/ directory, both built deliberately for AI clients. Neither contains a price.

At the other end, three of the seventeen publish no price anywhere: Artisan, Qualified and Coldreach. Coldreach's /pricing also returns a 404, and the "$899/month" figure that circulates widely appears on no Coldreach page — G2 records that no pricing was provided. Artisan moved away from published prices during 2026; its own launch post of 26 May 2026 announces a credit-based model with "pricing custom to your team", and the numbered tiers that used to be on the site are gone. That is a vendor's own account of its own change, not an inference.

Why this is turning into a commercial problem

Software shortlists used to be built by a person with fifteen tabs open. A growing share of them are now built by an assistant answering "compare these tools for me", and the assistant is working from exactly the pages above.

An assistant cannot fill in a missing number. It has three options:

1. Report what the raw markup contains — which is how €120 became La Growth Machine's public price on several comparison sites.
2. Repeat an aggregator — which is how Coldreach acquired a $899 price it never published, and how 11x acquired four different annual figures.
3. Say the vendor does not publish pricing — which is what happens to 11x, whose price is published, just not where anything looks.

None of those three is the answer the vendor would have chosen. And unlike a human visitor, an assistant does not bounce and come back later — it produces one comparison, the buyer reads it, and the vendor never learns it was in the wrong column. The cheapest fix in the category is also the most boring one: one canonical URL, prices in the served HTML, currency and billing cycle labelled next to the number, and the overage rate written down.

What we found when we checked ourselves

We build Lead Scorer, so we ran the same test on our own site rather than end on a lesson. Mixed result, stated in the order we found it:

• The llms.txt carries the full grid — free CRM at €0, Enrichment €20, Solo €49, Pro €99, Scale €199, the yearly cadence at 20% off (€468, €948, €1,908), plus the four credit packs at €49/1,000, €149/3,200, €399/9,000 and €999/25,000.
• And it is accurate. We diffed it against the billing configuration that actually charges the cards — every price, credit allowance, inbox count and AI budget matched, field for field, on 9 August 2026. That was worth verifying rather than assuming, given that one of the two machine-readable files in the survey is wrong about its own product.
• Per-action costs are published too, in the public skills library: 1 credit per lead enriched, 3 per email found, 15 per phone number. That puts us in the minority of the panel — twelve of seventeen tools publish no overage rate at all.
• But there is no /pricing URL, and what happens instead is worse than a 404: the path is not a marketing route at all, so a request for it is caught by the app and redirected to the login screen. An agent that guesses the conventional path gets a sign-in form, which reads exactly like a vendor hiding its prices behind a wall. Our grid actually lives at an anchor on the homepage, plus a /llm-info page. We should fix that, and writing it down here is a decent way to commit to it.
• We publish EUR only. No USD price anywhere, which is the exact gap we counted against the American vendors, running in the other direction.

What we could not read at all

The limits of this exercise are part of its result, so they are stated rather than buried:

• Gojiberry blocks automated reading outright — HTTP 403. Its $99 price rests entirely on four concordant third-party reviews with no vendor page behind them, which makes it the only tool in the survey we cannot source officially at all. A manual browser visit would settle it; we have not done it yet.
• Lemlist's currency selector never rendered from a US IP, so no official EUR price could be captured. The €69/€87 figures in circulation are third-party, and we are not printing them as prices.
• Coldreach publishes nothing at all, so there is no vendor claim here to verify — only the absence, and the rumour that fills it.
• Everything here is a snapshot of one day. A contradiction fixed on 10 August is still recorded above as of the 9th. That is why every claim carries the date, and why we will restate it when we recheck.

The cost side of the same research — what these seventeen tools actually charge one person running 500 prospects a month, with Lead Scorer priced under the identical assumptions and coming out worst on it — is in we priced 17 AI SDR tools for a team of one.