Who runs Triggerhouse, and how it reads a pricing page

Triggerhouse is an independent publication covering email and marketing automation software. It is written and maintained by one small editorial team, it is not owned by any platform it writes about, and no vendor sees a page before it goes live.

The one question this site asks

Every page here works from the same question: on the plan you would realistically buy, how much of an automation can you actually build? Vendors answer it, honestly, in the small print — a number of actions, a number of workflows, a number of active journeys — but almost never on the line you read first. Collecting those numbers, dating them and putting the cost of removing them next to the cost of living with them is the entire job.

How a price gets onto this site

1. It is read on the vendor's own pricing page, never from a directory, a listicle or another publisher's table.
2. It is recorded with the date it was read, the currency, the billing term, and the list size or seat count it applies to.
3. If the page builds its prices in the browser, the page is opened in a real browser rather than fetched as text — several platforms in this category publish nothing readable otherwise.
4. If a figure is not published, it is written as not published. Nothing is estimated, averaged across sources, or carried over from an older version of the page.

That last rule costs this site material regularly. Two platforms covered here have prices we could not read at all, and one has a required fee it does not disclose. Those gaps are printed as gaps, because a site that fills them with plausible numbers is a site whose real numbers cannot be trusted either.

What this site does not do

It does not run deliverability tests, measure open rates, or publish inbox-placement figures. Those numbers depend overwhelmingly on your list, your sending domain and your history, and a publisher who quotes them without having measured them is quoting the vendor's marketing with the attribution removed. Where a vendor makes a performance claim, this site attributes it to the vendor or leaves it out.

It also does not review newsletter tools for creators, rank general-purpose CRMs, or cover cold outreach software. Those are different buying decisions with different failure modes, and doing them badly alongside this one would help nobody.

The honest limits of the method

Reading a pricing page is not the same as using the product. This site can tell you that a plan allows five actions per automation; it cannot tell you whether that platform's builder is pleasant to work in, how its support behaves at 2am, or whether its deliverability suits your domain. For that, use the trials — most platforms here publish one — and treat the caps and the prices as the thing that decides your shortlist rather than your final answer.

Prices also move. Every figure on this site carries a date for exactly that reason. If you are reading months after that date, check the vendor's page before you commit, and if you find a difference worth knowing about, please write in.

Corrections

Errors get fixed quickly and visibly. If a figure here is wrong, or a cap has moved, email [email protected] with the page and what the vendor's site says now. Corrections to prices are made at the source the site is built from, so the change survives the next rebuild rather than being quietly overwritten.