Here's the trap. You screenshot the pricing page, put the number in a deck, and walk it to your CFO. Six weeks later the contract says something else, and you're the one who looks careless.
You weren't careless. You read a marketing asset and treated it as an offer, which is what everyone does, because it has a currency symbol on it and it's filed under Pricing.
A pricing page is closer to a menu photographed in good light. The dish exists. The portion, the sides and whether the sauce costs extra are all decided later, by someone else.
We re-read 96 published prices in this directory in one sweep and roughly half had moved or were wrong. Three had no vendor origin at all. Here are five specific mechanics, on named vendors, with the date each page was read. This is the sibling problem to the 108 tools that won't show you a price at all: those make you ask, these answer wrong.
How common is this, really?
Common enough to have a literature. A study by ICPEN, the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network, reports that 76% of SaaS companies use dark patterns and 66.8% use more than one. The FTC ran a review of 642 apps and websites with ICPEN and the Global Privacy Enforcement Network in July 2024.
That literature names two patterns worth holding onto: annual prices displayed as monthly so buyers calculate wrong, and per-seat pricing that doesn't reveal the full-team cost until checkout. We found both in this category without looking for them.
The five, named
| Vendor | What the page shows | What's actually true | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koncert | No prices at all | A price table exists, set to display:none | 7 Aug |
| Lusha | Tiers with % off badges | A slider sets the price; the discount skips seats | 12 Aug |
| Cal.com | One number, twice | It's an annual commitment, said once | 11 Aug |
| Lead411 | $49 | Per seat, and the page never says seat | 6 Aug |
| Genesys | Per user per month | Billed annually, $900 minimum | 12 Aug |
The table that's on the page but not on the page
Koncert's pricing page shows you nothing. Fetch the same page and the HTML contains a five-column comparison table carrying the numbers 6, 7, 29, 79 and 99, one per dialer product, hidden by a single CSS rule:
Before you get excited, those aren't prices. Each cell holds a bare integer. The span where a currency symbol belongs is missing entirely, and the span where a billing period belongs is present and empty. Somebody built a price table, took the prices out, and hid what was left.
That's worth knowing precisely because it's tempting. A number in the source of a pricing page feels like the truth behind the marketing. It isn't. It's a draft.
The slider that quietly reprices the tier
Lusha's page opens with a credit slider: I need a plan with N credits per year. Move it and the tier prices move with it.
So the tier isn't a product. It's a label attached to wherever your slider happened to stop. Two people quoting "the Pro plan" to each other may be quoting different numbers and never find out.
There's a second layer. Starter is badged 25% off, Pro 30%, Premium 35%, and a separate badge above the slider deepens from 30% to 40% as you ask for more credits. But the seat charge lands identically on the struck-through price and the discounted one, which means the sale doesn't apply to seats. If your cost is mostly seats, the discount you're reading is mostly decoration.
The annual commitment mentioned once
Cal.com shows the same number in two places on the same page. One of them says it's an annual commitment. The other doesn't.
There's no toggle to reveal a monthly price either, and we checked that in a rendered browser rather than inferring it from the served HTML, because a hidden toggle is a failure this site has now found three times in a fortnight.
This is the pattern the consumer literature names outright, and it works because of how people skim. You see a number, you see it again, the repetition reads as confirmation, and the qualifier only appeared once.
The per-seat price that never says seat
Lead411 publishes $49. The word seat appears nowhere on the public pricing page.
Every figure on it is per seat. The checkout says so. The marketing doesn't. For a team of six that's the difference between $49 and $294 a month, and the error compounds because per-seat is exactly the assumption a business case gets wrong quietly. Lead411's record here carries the checkout wording alongside the page wording.
Genesys does a milder version: priced per user per month, billed annually, with a $900 floor. Both numbers are on the page. Only one of them is what leaves your account.
What to check before a number goes in a deck
Four checks, ninety seconds, and they catch all five of the above.
- Multiply by your actual headcount before you write anything down. If the page doesn't say whether the figure is per seat, assume it is and confirm at checkout. Lead411 and Genesys both fail silently on this one.
- Look for the billing period next to the number, not elsewhere on the page. A qualifier in a different section is not attached to the price you screenshotted. Cal.com's annual commitment is said once, in the wrong place.
- Move every slider to your real volume before reading any tier price. On Lusha the tier is a label and the slider is the price. Reading the default is reading somebody else's quote.
- Check what the discount actually applies to. A percentage badge on a page is not a percentage off your invoice. Lusha's sale skips seats entirely, and seats may be most of your bill.
And date your screenshot. Half the prices we re-read had moved, and a figure without a date is a figure you can't defend when somebody asks where it came from.
The fastest way to get the real number
Start the checkout and stop before you pay.
It sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, because it feels like a commitment. It isn't. The checkout is the only surface on the whole site that has to be legally accurate, because that's where money moves. It's where Lead411's per-seat charge finally says seat, and it's where a slider default stops mattering.
Take a card, add your real headcount, pick your real volume, and read the total before the final button. On a self-serve tool that takes four minutes and gives you a number you can put in front of a CFO without qualifying it.
For anything gated, the equivalent move is asking the salesperson to put the per-seat figure, the minimum seat count and the billing period in the email rather than the deck. Decks get built by marketing. Emails get written by the person who'll be held to them.
What about the price after you sign?
Different problem, same shape, and worth knowing before you spend effort on the first number.
The dark-patterns literature reports that 81% of reviewed sites auto-renew, 70% don't say how to cancel, and 67% don't state the notice period you'd need to hit to avoid the next charge. Those are secondary-sourced figures, same caveat as above.
The practical version: the price you negotiate is a price for one term. Ask what it renews at and what notice you owe, and get both in writing at signature rather than discovering them in month eleven. A twenty percent uplift you agreed to without noticing is a bigger number than anything on the pricing page.
So why is the price different at checkout?
Because the pricing page was written by marketing and the checkout was written by finance, and only one of them has to be right.
None of these five is a lie. Koncert's hidden table is a draft someone forgot to delete. Lusha's slider is genuinely how the product is priced. Cal.com does say annual, once. Lead411's checkout is accurate. Every one of them would survive a lawyer.
That's the point. You aren't being defrauded, so nobody is going to fix it for you. The number is a starting position dressed as a fact, and the ninety seconds you spend checking the four things above is the whole defence you get.