Why We Publish Our Pricing (and Our Competitors' Best Features)

TL;DR: On our website there's a comparison table that says our competitors beat us at voice conversations, intent data and review counts. Our price, A$199 a month, is printed on the page, in our ads, and in this post. In a market where the leaders hide pricing behind three sales calls and the challengers hide their real costs inside usage meters, publishing everything is not niceness. It's the most aggressive move available, because transparency is the one strategy that only works if your product survives scrutiny, and the one strategy the rest of the market structurally can't copy. This article explains why demo-gating exists, what we publish and why, how to read any vendor's comparison page (including ours) with proper suspicion, and ends with the standing dare: run us against your contact form for 14 days and count.

On our website there is a comparison table that says our competitors beat us.

Not everywhere, and not on the things that matter most, or we wouldn't have a business. But it's there in black and white: the enterprise leader has voice and video conversations we don't have. Another rival ingests buyer-intent data we don't touch. The incumbents have thousands of reviews to our early handful. Rows conceded, dated, on our own domain, published by us, and every vendor has a page of their own naming where the facts came from.

Our lawyers didn't love it. Our buyers do. And the reason we do it is not virtue. It's strategy, and it's aimed directly at how the rest of this market sells. Let us show you the machinery.

Why the price isn't on their page

Start with the question every buyer in this category asks within the first hour: why does finding a price require a meeting?

The demo gate is not an oversight, and it's not because the products are too sophisticated to price. It's a designed funnel with a precise job: to make sure the number arrives after the emotion. First the discovery call, where they learn your pain and your budget. Then the demo, where the product performs its best five minutes. Only then, warmed and invested, do you receive a number, and the number is negotiable, custom, "aligned to your use case," which is to say: derived from what they learned you'd pay.

The economics of this are rational for the vendor. When the entry ticket runs to tens of thousands a year, the price is the objection, and objections are handled in conversations, not on webpages. But notice what the gate confesses: a price that can't survive being read without a chaperone is a price the vendor themselves doesn't trust you to accept on its merits.

Meanwhile the "transparent" end of the market performs a different trick: the price is published, but it's published in pieces. A friendly per-seat figure in large type, the usage meter in the help docs, the required scheduling add-on in a partner directory, and the all-in monthly cost in none of those places, because it doesn't exist until your invoice assembles it. Publication without legibility. The gate, rebuilt out of fine print.

What we publish, and the bet underneath it

Against that backdrop, here's our full disclosure policy, and then the reasoning.

We publish the price: A$199 a month for Starter, conversations included, no setup fee, no contract, and the tiers above it, all on the pricing page, no email required. We publish the comparison: every serious vendor in this market, rows we win, rows we lose, updated as the market moves, with the sources named on each vendor's own page. We publish the trial: 14 days, free, no credit card, self-serve, no card-up-front theatrics and no sales call unless you ask for one. And we publish the receipts behind our boldest claims, because a claim without a source is just typography.

The bet underneath all this is simple and slightly brutal: transparency is a weapon that only works if the product is real. A vendor whose value evaporates under side-by-side scrutiny cannot afford a public comparison table. A vendor whose price triples in the fine print cannot afford a legible pricing page. A vendor whose implementation takes a quarter cannot afford a self-serve trial, because the trial would consist of waiting. Radical disclosure is therefore not just honest, it's exclusionary: it's the marketing strategy available only to products that survive being examined. That's why we chose it, and that's why, structurally, most of this market can't follow us. Their business models are load-bearing on the opacity.

The rows we lose, and why they're on our page

The strangest part of our comparison table, people tell us, is the rows where we mark ourselves behind. So let's talk about why they're there, beyond the obvious point that they're true.

The enterprise leader really does offer voice and video agent conversations; we take speech input but reply in text, and full voice is roadmap, not product. Intent-data enrichment is real at the top of the market; we respond to what visitors actually say, not what their company researched elsewhere. And the incumbents' review counts reflect years and customer bases we haven't had yet.

We publish these because of who reads them. A buyer who needs voice agents today should not buy Aijent today, and if our page helps them work that out in five minutes, we've saved us both a doomed trial. But the buyer who doesn't need those things, which at mid-market is nearly everyone, reads those conceded rows and correctly concludes something more valuable than any claim we could make: the rest of this table can be trusted. Concession is the price of credibility, and it's the best marketing spend on our books.

Then they read the rows we win: the only agent that creates a real Zoom meeting with a calendar invite inside the conversation. Automatic training on your website the moment you sign up. Contacts, deals and full transcripts written to four CRMs. SureGate, the only definable go / review / no-go gate in market, on Growth and above. A flat published price. Live in minutes. Those rows sit on the same table, and they hit differently on a page that just admitted its weaknesses.

How to read anyone's comparison page, including ours

Since we're in the business of publishing comparisons, here's the reader's guide we'd want used on us. Five suspicions to bring to any vendor's table:

1. Check who picked the rows. Every comparison is an editorial act; the dimensions chosen are the argument. Ask what's missing. (Ours omits nothing we know to be material, but you shouldn't take that on faith: that's the point.)
2. Look for conceded rows. A table where the publisher wins everything is an advertisement wearing a lab coat. No concessions, no credibility.
3. Follow the sources. Claims about competitors should cite the competitor's own pages or named independent analyses, with dates. "As of" matters: this market moves quarterly.
4. Distinguish verified from estimated. Honest tables label which figures are vendor-published and which are third-party estimates. Beware confident precision about demo-gated prices.
5. Test one claim yourself. Pick the boldest row and verify it in the product. Ours is bookable in one conversation: talk to Aijent on our site, qualify yourself, and watch a real meeting land in a calendar. One verified claim is worth a page of asserted ones.

How demo-gating distorts the whole market, not just your quote

It's worth zooming out from the individual buyer's frustration to the market-level damage, because opacity isn't just annoying. It's expensive for everyone, in three compounding ways.

First, it destroys price discovery. In a market with published prices, vendors compete on value per dollar and the efficient ones win. In a demo-gated market, every deal is a private negotiation, which means pricing power flows to whoever negotiates for a living, and that is never the buyer. The spread between what two identical companies pay for the same product is pure information asymmetry, harvested.

Second, it taxes the honest. Every hour a buyer spends in discovery calls extracting a number is an hour subsidised by their own business. Multiply across every evaluation in the category and demo-gating functions as an industry-wide levy on buyers' time, paid before any value changes hands. The vendors call this "high-touch sales." The buyers' calendars call it something else.

Third, and least visibly: it protects weak products. Sunlight is competitive pressure. A market where offerings can't be compared side by side without four sales processes is a market where inferior products survive years longer than they should, because the comparison shopping that would kill them is too expensive to conduct. Opacity isn't just how the incumbents sell. It's how the category avoids its own reckoning.

Which reframes what a published price actually is: not a convenience, but a market position. Every vendor that publishes makes the whole category slightly more honest, and every vendor that gates is voting for the fog. We know which side we're on, and now you know how to read the sides.

The transparency stack: what checkable looks like in practice

"Radical transparency" is easy to claim, so here's the concrete stack of it, layer by layer, each one independently verifiable without speaking to us.

The price is legible end to end. Not just the headline: the tiers, what each includes, what happens past the conversation allowance, all published. The exercise of totalling your year-one cost takes one page and no meetings, and two identical companies pay identical amounts, which shouldn't be a distinguishing feature of anything and, in this market, is.

The comparison shows its homework. Every competitor claim on our matrix carries a source: the vendor's own pricing page, their documentation, their newsroom, or a named independent analysis, dated. Where a vendor doesn't publish something, we say "not disclosed" instead of asserting a number, and where our figures are estimates, they're labelled as estimates. Boring scholarly hygiene, weaponised.

The product is the demo. The agent on our website is the product, answering as it would for you, bookable end to end. The trial is the proof: your site, your traffic, your CRM, thirty days, and the dashboard shows you every transcript, including the conversations that went badly. Especially those, actually; that's what the door-policy tuning is for.

The gaps are on the record. Voice, intent data, review counts: conceded in public, with our roadmap honesty attached. A vendor who'll tell you what they lack has earned the right to be believed about what they have.

Each layer costs us something: negotiating room, benefit of the doubt, marketing gloss. Each buys the only asset that compounds in a low-trust market. Check us once and the second check is cheaper; check us twice and you stop needing to.

The standing dare

All of which builds to the offer we keep making, because it's transparency in its final form: don't believe the table at all. Measure us.

Run Aijent beside your existing contact form for 14 days. Free, same website, same traffic, same month. Count what the form catches: submissions, half of them "just checking prices," answered the next business day. Count what Aijent books: qualified conversations, real Zoom meetings with invites sent in-chat, contacts and deals and transcripts in your CRM, visitors sorted GO, REVIEW and NO-GO by standards you wrote yourself. Then decide with your own numbers on the table.

If the form wins, keep the form, with our genuine respect: it will have earned its first victory in the history of contact forms. We make this dare in public, repeatedly, for the same reason everything else in this article exists: we don't ask to be trusted. We ask to be checked. In a market of demo gates, assembled invoices and AI badges on flowcharts, being checkable is the whole brand.

The price is A$199 a month. It was in the first paragraph, it's in the ads, and it'll be on the button when you arrive. Nothing to uncover. That's the point.

See the full comparison, or take us head to head with Intercom Fin, Qualified, Drift or 1mind. Then start the 14-day dare at aijency.ai. Bring your suspicion. It's welcome here.