StackValue exists because pricing pages lie by omission.
Not deliberately, usually. A hosting provider publishes “$6.49/mo” and, further down, in smaller type, the term it applies to. A cloud provider posts a rate card and quietly replaces it three months later. A tool’s documentation shows an environment variable that its own release notes deprecated. None of it is fraud. All of it costs you money.
This site does one thing: it checks the number, writes down the date, and links to where it came from.
What we actually do
Every price on this site was read off the vendor’s own page on a stated date. Not copied from another comparison article, not remembered from last year, not estimated. When a figure could not be verified, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
That sounds like a low bar. It is. Most comparison articles in this space do not clear it, which is why a hosting comparison published in 2026 can still be quoting prices that changed in April, and again in June.
We also try to publish the parts that get left out:
- Renewal price, not just the promotional one
- What the term actually costs. The amount due today, not the monthly figure it divides into
- Add-on fees that only appear after you have committed
- 12- and 24-month totals, because that is the decision being made
- The date it was last checked, on every page
What we do not do
We do not recommend a product because it pays more. Where a service with no affiliate program is the right answer for a given situation, it goes in the table with the others, the comparison is worthless otherwise.
We do not write in the first person about things that did not happen. If a page describes running something, it was run. If it reasons from documentation and pricing, it says it is reasoning from documentation and pricing. There is a real difference and blurring it is how technical writing becomes worthless.
We do not run an automated check that compares a draft with existing search results. In the automated publishing run described below, topics come from a list of candidates and pages are published under a daily limit; the aim for each page is something the vendor’s own page does not give you, such as a worksheet or a decision table.
Three kinds of pages here
Pages about something we ran. This site runs on a small VPS: Docker, Caddy, WordPress on php-fpm and MariaDB, on a 2 GB Amazon Lightsail instance when we measured it on 30 August 2026. A few pages report what happened on that machine, or in a test we set up, with the date and the commands: how much RAM WordPress used, four things that broke in the first three days, and a pg_dump failure case in the n8n 2.x upgrade guide, run in a throwaway PostgreSQL 16 instance on 8 September 2026. The dated price ledger explains how its daily page watch on our own server works.
Pages that read a vendor’s own pages. Most other pages read vendors’ published prices, help articles and terms, give the date of the reading and link the source. Many say so in their first lines, for example: “This is a reading of Microsoft’s pages, not a test.”
Pages that calculate from those prices. Some pages turn dated, published prices into arithmetic and show their inputs with the date each was read: the managed hosting cost calculator and the Hetzner backups vs snapshots break-even. Where a result also depends on something we could not measure, such as the hours a server takes to run in the n8n Cloud vs self-hosted cost model or the managed hosting hourly comparison, the page labels it an assumption and shows how the answer moves when it changes.
How pages are made
Pages on StackValue are drafted by an AI model from the vendor pages, documents and measurements they cite, and are published as StackValue Editorial. Since October 2026, most new pages go out through an automated publishing run. In that run, the AI pairs each factual sentence with a quoted passage from an official source and an automated check confirms that the passage appears on that page; a separate AI review then reads the draft. A page whose topic or title contains a word from a fixed list (for example price, cost, subscription, refund, policy or security) also needs a pass from a second, independent AI reviewer. The run follows rules the site owner set, and no person reads a page in it before it goes live; the owner is sent a notice with each published page’s link and a daily summary.
How this is funded
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the vendor pays a commission and your price is unchanged. No vendor has paid for placement, wording, or a ranking, and none has seen a page before it was published. The full disclosure is on our affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections
Prices move and we get things wrong. If a figure on this site is out of date or incorrect, say so, corrections are made and the verification date is updated. That is the whole product.