Five pricing pages, side by side
By Owen Fisher·Updated 24 July 2026·8 min read
A pricing sweep captures five rivals' pricing pages on desktop and phone in one run, then reads across them with a fixed set of questions: tier counts, the featured plan, trial versus demo, what hides behind contact us. This worked example walks the process and ends in a comparison deck, with Stravue doing the capture.
Why sweep five at once
One pricing page tells you what a rival charges. Five, side by side, tell you how a category charges. The patterns only appear across sites: what everyone does, what one site does differently, and what nobody does at all. A sweep is a teardown turned sideways: one page type, many sites, one fixed set of questions asked of each. This example walks it end to end so you can copy the process, with any capture method. Stravue is the fast path.
Pick five rivals in one category
The sweep only works if the five sites sell to roughly the same buyer. Mixing an enterprise vendor into a field of self-serve tools muddies every comparison. A sensible spread: the category leader, two direct rivals at your size, one newer entrant, and one adjacent product your buyers also consider. Write down why each made the list. That sentence becomes the context slide of the deck.
Capture every page in one run
Capture all ten shots before reading any of them: five pricing pages at desktop width, the same five at phone width. Capturing first matters more here than in a single-site study, because a fair comparison needs all five pages frozen at the same moment. In Stravue, paste each site with "pricing" as what you're after, confirm the proposed page, and the run returns clean full-page captures of both widths with cookie banners and chat widgets removed. By hand, budget a couple of hours across ten captures; the screenshot tools roundup compares the ways to do it.
The sweep, step by step
- 1
Fix the question set before capturing
Decide the questions you will ask of every site, and hold them constant. The readacross table below is a working default. Changing questions halfway through quietly breaks the comparison.
- 2
Capture all five pricing pages, both widths
Desktop and phone for each site, in one sitting, so every capture carries the same date. Ten captures in total. With Stravue this is one short run; by hand, block out the time and file the shots carefully.
- 3
Answer the question set for each site
Work through one site at a time, pinning the answer to each question directly on the capture. Tier count on the tiers, the featured plan on its highlight, the trial button on the button.
- 4
Read across, not down
Now switch axis. Take one question at a time and look at all five answers together. This is where the patterns, the odd one out and the gaps show themselves.
- 5
Build the comparison deck
One slide per question, showing the five answers side by side, then a closing slide with what the category norm is and where the open ground sits. Export or send a read-only share link.
The readacross questions
Ask the same questions of every site, in the same order. Pin the answers on the captures as you go, so every cell in your eventual comparison points at visible evidence.
| Question | What the answer tells you |
|---|---|
| How many tiers, and what are they called? | Whether the category segments by team size, usage or ambition, and whose naming your buyers already speak |
| Which plan is visually featured? | Where each rival wants the default buyer to land, and how hard they push the upsell |
| Free trial, demo, or both? | Whether the category sells self-serve or through a sales conversation, and who breaks rank |
| What sits behind "contact us"? | Which capabilities the category reserves for sales conversations, and where price transparency ends |
| How is the annual discount framed? | Monthly-first or annual-first defaults, and how loudly the saving is sold |
| What does the phone version cut? | Which tiers, tables and reassurances each rival considers expendable when space runs out |
What a sweep typically surfaces
No two sweeps return the same answers, but the shapes repeat. Look for three of them. First, the cluster: on most questions, three or four of the five sites will do roughly the same thing. That cluster is the category norm, and it is what your buyers arrive expecting. Second, the odd one out: one site usually breaks the pattern somewhere, and the interesting question is whether that is a deliberate bet or a page nobody has touched in a year. Third, the gap: a question where no site gives a good answer. An unclaimed position is the most valuable thing a sweep can hand you, and it only ever shows up in the readacross, never on a single page.
The phone captures deserve their own pass. Pricing tables are the layout most likely to fall apart at phone width, so look at how each rival collapses theirs: tiers stacked or hidden behind tabs, comparison rows dropped, the featured plan losing its highlight. If a rival's phone page quietly buries the plan their desktop page pushes, that mismatch is a finding worth a slide.
Desktop
Phone
Ending in the comparison deck
The sweep ends as a deck, not a spreadsheet. One slide per readacross question, the five answers visible side by side, your one-line reading underneath. Close with two slides: the category norms, and the open ground. Export to PowerPoint or PDF, or send a read-only share link that opens without a signup. Slide order and captioning are covered in how to present competitor research.
A sweep is a snapshot, and pricing pages move. Rather than re-running the whole exercise on a hunch, put the five pages on watch and let the changes come to you. The quarterly watch example shows that setup.