Where every number comes from.

For each tool you name, the Brief computes a yearly cost at list: seats × the published list price of a named plan, USD, billed annually. The plan, price, source, and the date we checked it are in the table below — the same data the Brief uses, not a summary of it.

If you state what you actually pay, your number replaces ours — an invoice is truer than a list price. List prices are best read as a ceiling: most companies negotiate below them, which is exactly why we never dress this arithmetic up as a savings claim.

The registry above covers six tools. That is the whole of it: each entry took real research — a named plan, a cited price, a lock-in judgment with a reason attached — and we add entries at the speed that standard allows, not at the speed a longer table would impress.

A tool outside the registry comes back marked assess — no number— rather than guessed. The consequence is worth stating plainly: if your stack runs long on tools we haven’t studied, an early Brief will carry more assess marks than priced lines. We’d rather hand you that than a page of invented figures.

Coverage only moves one way. Every paid Audit produces a versioned exit playbook for each tool it studies, and playbooks are reused — the next engagement that meets the same tool starts from what the last one learned. Each audit deepens the registry; nothing studied is studied from scratch twice.

Lock-in is a judgment, so we publish it as one: for each tool, a level — high, medium, low — and a written reason you can argue with. High means leaving is a program (systems of record, custom code, years of history). Medium means the data leaves but the workflows must be rebuilt. Low means the data exports cleanly and the workflows are habits, not code.

Verdicts follow the same rule. Keep, renegotiate, or exit is our current default call for the tool, stated with its reasoning — a starting position for the paid Exit Audit, the full study, not a substitute for it. Assess is what every tool outside the registry gets: no number, no verdict — a research item, named as one.

Everything above describes the $0 Brief. The Exit Audit — the paid study, $2,500–$12,000 fixed and never credited toward a build — runs on evidence the twelve-minute interview cannot reach: your usage data, your invoices, and how your tools are actually wired together. The Brief prices a stack from published list prices and what you tell us; the Audit measures it.

The interview sits behind a sign-in: we email a link to your work address, and clicking it is the whole sign-in — no password, and personal email domains are declined. Before the first question, that address is all we have asked of you.

From there we keep what you tell the interview — your stack, seat counts, spend, and constraints — and use it to produce your Exit Brief and, where the interview qualifies, your written proposal. We do not sell your data. Anonymized, aggregate patterns may inform our published research; nothing that identifies you ever does.

Ask us to delete anything you’ve submitted and we will — any channel on the contact page reaches a person who can do it. The full statement is on the privacy page.