Tool Pricing Audit, Part 2: We Checked the Other 40 — Here's What Held Up
In our first pricing audit, we sampled 30 of the 70 tools in tool-registry.ts — the single file every DIY guide's tool cards read their price from — and found 7 had drifted. We deliberately didn't touch the other ~40 that time. The reasoning was simple: we weighted the first sample toward subscription SaaS specifically because a monthly-billed product can reprice at any time, while a free tool, an open-source project, or a one-time hardware purchase mostly can't. The other 40 are disproportionately exactly that kind of tool — VS Code, WordPress, Blender, a USB microphone, a ring light. Auditing them felt like a lower-priority use of the time.
"Lower priority" isn't the same as "zero risk," though, and we said so explicitly in the first post's limits section: "we're not claiming they're all current, only that we didn't check them this time." Weeks have passed. So this is the follow-through — not a full sweep of all 40, but a real, weighted spot-check of 21 of them, biased toward the ones most likely to actually hide a subscription: freemium tools that could have added a paid tier since we last looked, and tools in categories (WordPress plugins, Amazon seller software, whiteboard-animation SaaS) where we've now seen enough drift elsewhere on this site to know "probably fine" isn't the same as "verified fine."
- We checked 21 of the ~40 tools the first audit deliberately skipped — chosen because each one plausibly has (or could have grown) a recurring paid tier, not because they were flagged as high-risk before.
- 5 of the 21 (23.8%) had genuinely drifted. We corrected all 5 directly in tool-registry.ts, the same standard as the first audit — a real edit plus an inline comment recording what changed and what we verified it against.
- One correction was bigger than a number changing: Adtomic (an Amazon PPC tool) was rebranded "Helium 10 Ads" in Feb 2025 and folded into the base Helium 10 subscription for free — it's no longer sold standalone at all. We also found the registry had been calling it "PPC Entourage / Adtomic," incorrectly conflating it with a genuinely separate, unrelated competitor. We fixed both the price and the name.
- 16 of the 21 (76.2%) were confirmed accurate — almost the identical hit rate as the first pass (23.3% drifted then vs. 23.8% now), which is itself a useful data point: this second, supposedly-lower-risk sample drifted at basically the same rate as the first, higher-risk one.
- Running tally across both audits: 51 of 70 tools now checked, 12 total corrections found (7 + 5). 19 tools in the full registry remain unchecked by either pass — see the honest accounting at the end.
21
Previously-unsampled tools checked this pass
5
Found drifted and corrected in tool-registry.ts
76.2%
Of this sample confirmed accurate as-is
51 / 70
Total tools checked across both audits
Why These 21, Specifically
The first audit's sample was built around a simple filter: subscription software over free/OSS/one-time tools. That filter is still directionally right, but "the remaining 40" isn't a uniform pile of zero-risk tools — some of them are freemium products that could have quietly added a paid tier since anyone last checked, and some sit in categories (WordPress performance plugins, Amazon seller software, AI chatbot builders) where we've since watched other tools on this exact site reprice hard. So instead of picking randomly, or skipping the remaining 40 entirely, we picked the ones most likely to actually be wrong:
- Freemium tools with a plausible paid tier — DBeaver, Super.so, Typefully, ShortPixel, Perfmatters, Botpress, Tidio, Voiceflow, Coursera, Anaconda — anything with a "Free (Pro: $X)" shape in its price string, where the $X is exactly the kind of number a vendor revises.
- Explicit dollar-figure subscriptions in categories we hadn't touched yet — TweetHunter, Jungle Scout, Adtomic, Supermetrics, Doodly, VideoScribe — social/marketing/Amazon-seller/whiteboard-animation tools, none of which overlapped with the Adobe/AI/ecommerce categories the first audit already covered.
- Recently-restructured ecosystems — Canva and Canva Video (separate registry entries from the already-audited Canva Pro, worth checking independently since Adobe/Canva-adjacent tools are exactly where we found the first audit's biggest single correction), plus Megascans and Sketchfab, both mid-migration to Epic's Fab marketplace when the registry entries were last written.
- A control check on an already-flagged discontinuation — Adobe Premiere Rush, to confirm a past "this is discontinued" note is still true and not itself gone stale.
For each, we searched for the vendor's own current pricing page or a recently-dated tracker, cross-checked contradictory-looking aggregator numbers against a primary source where we could reach one, and classified the result as confirmed accurate or drifted — exactly the same two-bucket standard the first audit used. Every drifted entry got a real edit in tool-registry.ts with an inline comment, not just a mention in this post.
A methodology wrinkle worth naming: aggregator noise
The 5 Corrections We Made This Pass
These are the entries where we changed tool-registry.ts itself. Every row is a real edit, live in the source file every DIY guide's tool cards read from — and, unlike some pre-existing entries in this file, each of these 5 is now also wired through registrySlug on its DIY-page recommendation, so the corrected price actually reaches the rendered page instead of sitting only in this database (see the verification section below for why that distinction mattered here).
All 5 Corrections, Before and After
| Tool | Old Registry Price | Corrected Price | What Actually Changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Helium 10 Ads (was "PPC Entourage / Adtomic") | From $50/mo | Included free in Platinum (limited) / Diamond & Elite (full) — no separate fee | Adtomic was rebranded Helium 10 Ads in Feb 2025 and folded into the base subscription instead of being sold as a standalone add-on. The registry's name field had also incorrectly conflated it with PPC Entourage, a genuinely separate, unrelated competitor with its own percentage-of-ad-spend pricing model — that name is now corrected too. |
| Supermetrics | From $30/mo | From $39/mo billed annually ($49/mo month-to-month) | The entry-level Starter plan's price rose. Confirmed directly against supermetrics.com/pricing. |
| ShortPixel | Free (100 images/mo), from $3.99/mo | Free (100 images/mo), from $9.99/mo (Unlimited plan) | ShortPixel retired its old tiered monthly-credit plans entirely in favor of one flat-rate "Unlimited" plan, explicitly pitched by ShortPixel itself as replacing what used to cost $49.99/mo. The free tier's 100 images/mo is unchanged. |
| Perfmatters | $24.95/yr | $29.95/yr | Single-site license price rose. Confirmed directly against perfmatters.io/pricing. |
| VideoScribe | From $20.65/mo | From ~$19/mo (Lite; Core and Max tiers above it) | The old single-tier plan this price referenced no longer exists — VideoScribe now sells three tiers (Lite, Core, Max), with Lite as the new entry point. |
The 5 Corrections, Grouped by Drift Type
Source: Memvers tool-registry.ts audit, part 2, 5 corrected entries, July 2026
The Adtomic correction is a different species of bug than anything in the first audit
The Other 16: Confirmed Accurate, Left Alone
Same as the first audit: we're showing the full sample, not just the mistakes.
The 16 Tools Confirmed Accurate As-Is
| Tool | Registry Price (unchanged) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Canva | Free (Pro: $15/mo) | Independent entry from the already-audited Canva Pro; matches current canva.com pricing exactly. |
| Canva Video | Free (Pro: $15/mo) | Same underlying product and price as Canva / Canva Pro; confirmed unchanged. |
| DBeaver | Free (Pro: $10/mo) | Confirmed against a specific search for the individual PRO tier — several aggregator sites conflate this with DBeaver Enterprise/Team licenses priced $199-499/mo, which is a different product tier entirely. |
| Super.so | From $12/mo | Current pricing is $16/mo billed month-to-month or $144/yr ($12/mo) billed annually — the registry's $12/mo already reflects the annual-billed rate, the same convention used elsewhere in this file (e.g. Claude Pro, Notion). Not corrected; flagged as the same known billing-cadence ambiguity noted in the first audit's limits section. |
| Typefully | Free (Starter: $8/mo) | Confirmed directly against typefully.com/pricing. |
| Coursera | Varies (many free to audit) | Deliberately vague wording holds up regardless of Coursera Plus's own price moving between $399/yr and a 40%-off $240/yr promo — nothing to correct in a string that never claimed a specific figure. |
| TweetHunter | From $29/mo | Entry-level DISCOVER plan confirmed at $29/mo directly on tweethunter.io/pricing. |
| Jungle Scout | From $49/mo | Confirmed — Jungle Scout renamed its plan tiers (Basic/Suite → Starter/Growth Accelerator/Brand Owner) under a new "Catalyst" branding, but the $49/mo entry price itself is unchanged. |
| Botpress | Free (limited), from $89/mo | Plus plan confirmed at exactly $89/mo + AI Spend, despite a May 2026 pricing-structure update (unlimited bots, bundled AI spend) that changed what's included at that price, not the price itself. |
| Tidio | Free (50 conversations/mo), from $29/mo | Free tier's 50-conversations-per-month limit confirmed as a genuinely monthly recurring allowance (not a one-time lifetime cap) directly against tidio.com/pricing. Paid entry price within normal annual/monthly billing variance of $29/mo. |
| Voiceflow | Free (limited), from $60/mo | Pro plan confirmed at $60/editor/month. |
| Doodly | From $49/mo | Standard plan confirmed at exactly $49/mo directly on doodly.com/doodly-pricing, despite conflicting lower figures on several third-party aggregator sites. |
| Adobe Premiere Rush | Discontinued — see description | Re-confirmed: removed from Adobe.com and app stores Sept 30, 2025, existing installs work until Sept 30, 2026, replaced by the free Adobe Premiere app for iPhone (Android in development). The discontinuation note from a past pass has held up. |
| Quixel Megascans (via Fab) | Mostly paid now, from $0.99/asset (some free assets remain) | Confirmed — individual assets on Fab still start at $0.99; a separate $4.99 figure found in research refers to procedural asset kits, a different, higher category, not the per-asset floor. |
| Sketchfab | Free (view-only models); paid purchases now happen via Fab | Confirmed exactly as described — the Sketchfab Store was fully replaced by Fab, models remain free to view, and purchases route through Fab. |
| Anaconda | Free for individuals (paid license required for orgs 200+ employees) | Confirmed — the 200-employee threshold for requiring a paid Business license is exactly right per anaconda.com/pricing. |
A Second Bug We Fixed Along the Way: 5 Corrections That Weren't Reaching Any Page
Correcting tool-registry.ts only matters if a real page actually reads from it. When we went to verify our 5 corrections would show up live, we found none of them would have: the DIY guides recommending Adtomic, Supermetrics, ShortPixel, Perfmatters, and VideoScribe all live in diy-expansion-batch.ts, and every recommendation in that file carries its own hand-typed price string with no registrySlug set — meaning resolveRecommendedTool() has nothing to bridge from and silently falls back to the old inline copy. We saw this same pattern already flagged as a known, ongoing migration in this codebase (a series of past commits titled "wire N more entries into the tool-registry pricing bridge"), so we did the same for the 5 tools we corrected: added registrySlug to each one's DIY-page recommendation, so our fix actually reaches /diy/amazon-ppc-manager, /diy/looker-studio-developer, /diy/whiteboard-animation-creator, and /diy/wordpress-speed-optimizer instead of only living in this database. We did not attempt to wire every other tool in that file — that's a larger, separate migration this post isn't the place to finish.
If you're auditing a pricing database of your own
The Running Tally: 51 of 70, 12 Corrections, 19 Left
Two audits in, here's the honest state of the full registry:
30
Checked in audit #1
21
Checked in audit #2 (this post)
51 / 70
Total unique tools checked (73%)
12
Total corrections across both passes (7 + 5)
For full transparency, here's what's genuinely still unverified: VS Code, WordPress, PostgreSQL, OBS Studio, Audacity, BandLab, Blender, Poly Haven, Roblox Studio, Google Sheets, Cloudflare, LiteSpeed Cache — all free or open-source, where "pricing drift" mostly isn't a coherent risk in the first place — plus Claude / ChatGPT (the "ai-sql-assistant" entry, which just points to the already-confirmed Claude/ChatGPT free tiers), the AT2020 USB microphone, the ring light, and the photo lightbox, which are hardware with a price range rather than a subscription to drift. We're not auditing these next purely because they were "left over" — genuinely, the risk here is close to zero, and we'd rather spend a future pass's time re-checking tools that already drifted once (the way this post re-checked the first audit's 3 prior catches) than working through a punch list of free software for its own sake.
On the 23.8% vs. 23.3% coincidence
What This Means If You're Pricing Out a Tool Stack
A product can disappear without a 404 — check the name, not just the number
"Lower risk" is a reason to sample smart, not a reason to skip entirely
Fixing a database doesn't fix a website — verify the page, not just the record
Aggregator pricing trackers disagree with each other more than vendor pages do
The Limits of This Audit
- 19 of 70 registry entries remain unchecked by either audit — see the list above. We believe the risk there is genuinely low (mostly free/OSS/hardware), but "believe" isn't the same as "verified," and we're saying so rather than rounding up to "the whole registry is now audited."
- This is a snapshot as of 2026-07-06, same as the first audit. Every price here, corrected or confirmed, can move again the moment a vendor updates its page.
- Super.so's $12/mo is only accurate if you read it as the annual-billed rate ($16/mo month-to-month) — we left it unchanged rather than "fix" an ambiguity that's consistent with how several other entries in this file already express price (Claude Pro, Make.com, n8n, Notion all do the same thing, flagged in the first audit's limits section too).
- Some of the pricing pages we needed for this pass (Botpress, DBeaver's own buy page) blocked direct fetches or loaded pricing dynamically via JavaScript; where that happened, we cross-checked multiple independent search results rather than relying on a single aggregator's number, but we can't claim the same direct-source confidence we had for pages that fetched cleanly (Perfmatters, Supermetrics, VideoScribe, ShortPixel).
- We can only compare against what a search or vendor page shows at the moment we check — the same limitation the first audit named, and it hasn't gone away.
fiverr
If Your Tool Stack Keeps Repricing, a Freelancer Might Be the More Predictable Cost
A subscription tool that quietly renamed a tier, raised its entry price, or got folded into a different product mid-year can be a less predictable line item than a one-off freelancer with a fixed quote.
Related Reading
FAQ / Citation Info
Frequently Asked Questions
- We checked 21 of the 40 tools our first pricing audit deliberately skipped as lower-risk — 5 (23.8%) had still drifted, almost the same rate as the first audit's higher-risk sample (23.3%)
- One correction wasn't a price change at all: Adtomic was rebranded Helium 10 Ads in Feb 2025 and folded free into the base subscription — the registry's old name also incorrectly conflated it with an unrelated competitor, PPC Entourage
- ShortPixel retired its old tiered credit plans entirely for a flat $9.99/mo Unlimited plan, replacing what the registry still listed as $3.99/mo
- None of our 5 corrections would have reached a live page without also fixing a second bug: the DIY guides recommending these tools weren't wired to read from the registry at all
- 51 of 70 tools in the registry have now been checked across two audits, with 12 total corrections found — 19 tools, nearly all free/OSS/hardware, remain honestly unchecked