Most SaaS buyers do the same thing: read a review, glance at a “starting price”, and subscribe. Then the first renewal surprises them, or the feature they paid for turns out to be an add-on. This page is the short version of how we verify tools at ToolProofs — three checks that take about fifteen minutes total and catch most of the gap between marketing and what you actually pay.
Step 1: Read the official pricing page, and date it
The vendor’s own pricing page is the strongest source, but it moves. When we checked CapCut’s official page on 2026-10-27, the Pro tier was USD 19.99/month or USD 179.99/year — not the cheaper figure some older third-party trackers showed. When we checked OpusClip the same day, Starter was $15/month monthly-only, while Pro was $29/month or $14.5/month billed annually. Two patterns that burn buyers: prices that changed within the last year (your remembered number is stale), and annual discounts that hide the monthly reality. Write down the page name and the date you read it. If a review site quotes a price, it should be able to tell you which page it read and when — that is the publishing-discipline bar we hold ourselves to in every pricing and terms check on this site (see our Cal.com pricing terms check, where Teams was independently re-verified at $12/user/mo on 2026-09-02, and our Zapier/Calendly/ClickUp pricing checks).
Step 2: Find the review that shows its work
A useful review tells you what it actually tested and when. Platform review sites like G2 and Capterra aggregate customer sentiment and will gladly rank vendors — but the same data often powers their vendor-paid tiers, and their listings rarely show the date a given claim was verified. TrustRadius has built its reputation on requiring verified buyers while being more explicit about methodology; Reddit threads give unfiltered owner voices but are easy to astroturf; SaaSHub runs a genuinely free submission tool and focuses on indie software. None of these layers is the answer alone. The answer is a review you can audit: which build, which test date, which evidence file. That is the difference between “we tested it” and “we visited the homepage”.
Step 3: Look for a dated price-change signal
The most useful signal is a third party that tracks pricing pages over time. PricingSaaS tracks thousands of SaaS pricing pages and publishes dated before/after changes — its own database entries show plans moving, for example an essential plan from $29/seat with a 35% off promotion to $19 (captured 2026-10-27). GetPricePulse offers the same idea as a price-change database. A dated change log is worth more than any single screenshot, because it tells you the direction of travel: if the vendor keeps raising entry prices, budget for that in year two.
What this costs you
Fifteen minutes per tool: open the official page (Step 1), find one auditable review (Step 2), check a dated tracker (Step 3). If a tool can’t survive those three checks, that is information too. This is the same discipline behind every ToolProofs review and terms check: only numbers found in this capture, evidence files you can open, and no claims about tests we never ran.