About

Choosing it is one of the more expensive calls a small crew makes, and it is unusually hard to research. Card processing rates sit off the pricing page. Half the published pricing is stale and the other half says contact sales. Most of the comparisons are written by the companies being compared.

So we do the reading. Every price on this site comes off the vendor's own pricing page, and it carries the page it came from and the day it was read. Where a company publishes no number, we say so rather than estimating one. Where two of a company's own pages disagree, we say that too. There are 64 platforms on the site today.

We put the comparisons on the same terms, and that usually means a crew rather than a seat: the headline price covers one person on some of these platforms and eight on others, so the useful question is what a five-person crew pays. That is what the calculator works out, and what the picker shortlists against.