How to get a Software Advice listing: vendor submission, free profiles and pricing data, and how to record a price band properly

You get on to Software Advice by submitting your product as a vendor and completing the profile fields the platform asks for, and the field most vendors get wrong is pricing, because a directory usually displays price as a band rather than as a number. A band is a display format, not a measurement, and the number of levels in it, what each level means, and whether the level is set by you or by the platform are all questions with one correct source: the platform's own current help material. As of 29 September 2026 we have not made a dated check of that material, so this page states no scale, no level count and no thresholds. What it gives you is how to record a price band so the record survives, the twelve fields to log, and the dated evidence we hold about what happens when your own price is not readable, which is from legal research software in India.

The answer, first

Four statements.

A band is not a price, and a buyer cannot budget from one. Whatever symbols a directory uses, the band compresses your real pricing into a bucket. That is useful for filtering and useless for deciding. This is the argument for publishing a real figure, with a date and a unit, on a page you own.

We publish no level count and no scale, because we have not checked it on a dated basis. The page to read is the platform's own vendor help and its buyer facing explanation of how pricing is displayed. Open it, record the URL and the date, save a copy, and write down exactly what the scale is and what each level covers. If you take one thing from this page, take the habit of recording price, date and URL on the same line, every time.

We do not restate any platform's or competitor's pricing. The reason is measured. On 17 September 2026 two clawlaw.in comparison pages stated competitors' prices with no link, no date and no source. Claude checked the figures independently and found them correct, and it still treated the pages as advocacy and used official sources instead, because at read time it had no way to know they were correct. An undated price does not become trustworthy by being right.

The free profile is the normal starting point. These directories generally allow a profile without payment and sell placement and lead flow separately. What is free and what is paid on the day you read this belongs on the platform's own pages, with the currency and the billing basis recorded next to any figure you copy.

How it was measured

Two things get measured here and they are different jobs. First, how the platform displays price, which is a documentation check. Second, whether your own price is readable to the machines that answer buyer questions, which is a technical check you can run in ten minutes.

One. The documentation check, in five steps.

• Name the source pages that count: the vendor help article on pricing information, the buyer facing note on how price is shown, and the vendor terms. Exclude blogs, webinars and support chats, and list them separately as unofficial.
• Record URL, read date, and any last updated stamp, then save a copy you can reopen.
• Write down the scale exactly as the page presents it, including how many levels there are, what each level is defined as, and in which currency the definitions are expressed. A scale defined in one currency and shown to an Indian buyer is a conversion, and the conversion date matters.
• Record who sets the level, you or the platform, and what happens if you leave the field blank.
• Recheck quarterly and keep the old copy, so you can publish what changed rather than silently updating.

Two. Twelve fields to log for your own pricing, wherever it is published. This is the sheet that keeps two public price lists from contradicting each other.

• Where the price appears: your own pricing page, the directory profile, an app store listing, a partner page, a PDF.
• The exact URL.
• The figure or band, copied exactly as printed.
• The currency.
• The unit: per user per month, per organisation per year, per matter, per document.
• The billing basis: monthly, annual, annual paid monthly.
• Whether tax treatment is stated.
• The minimum term or minimum seat count, if any.
• What the price includes, quoted.
• What it excludes, quoted.
• The date you last verified that line.
• Who owns the page, so somebody can be asked to change it.

Three. The crawler readability check. Fetch your own pricing page the way a machine does, without running scripts, and read what comes back. If the numbers are not in that response, they do not exist for anything that reads your site without a browser. This is not theory. On 6 August 2026 the clawlaw.in pricing page rendered its prices only after scripts had run, so what a crawler received contained no prices at all, and the prices the assistants quoted had come from an app store listing instead of from the company's own site. Claude's run recorded it, and it is checkable from outside.

Four. The contradiction check. Put every row from the twelve field sheet side by side and look for two public prices that disagree. On the same date, 6 August 2026, ChatGPT found that the clawlaw.in website and its app store listing carried different plan names and different prices for the same product, and it said so inside its answer. A contradiction you have not found is a contradiction an assistant will find and repeat in front of a buyer.

Five. Record anything a machine tells you about the platform as a claim. Save the answer, date it, then verify each line against your saved copy of the official page. In the September 2026 aiknowsus.com audit, Perplexity withdrew its own claim to have searched, in three separate batches, saying it could not honestly substantiate it.

What the numbers were

Dated checks of this platform's pricing display completed by us: zero, as of 29 September 2026. So this page carries no level count, no scale and no thresholds. It also carries no platform price and no competitor price, by policy.

The dated results we do hold about prices and how assistants treat them. All three are from legal research software sold in India, and all three are checkable from outside because they concern public pages.

• Prices invisible to a crawler. 6 August 2026, Claude's run: the pricing page rendered prices only after scripts ran, a crawler received none, and the quoted prices came from an app store listing.
• Two public price lists disagreeing. 6 August 2026, ChatGPT: the website and the app store listing carried different plan names and different prices for the same product, and it said so in its answer.
• Price transparency treated as a source quality signal. 17 September 2026, Claude: two enterprise vendors were ranked above clawlaw.in on a coverage question, and the assistant said its ordering reflected price transparency and source authority rather than product quality.

The nearest real fraction we hold, with its sector named. 1 of 18. Across eighteen blind commercial questions on 18 August 2026, ChatGPT made clawlaw.in the top source on exactly one, and named its comparison page in the answer as still being the vendor's own editorial page. Legal research software, India. Not a number about directory profiles, and not a number about any other sector.

What this cannot tell you

• It cannot tell you the current scale or its levels. Only the platform's page can, on the day you read it.
• It cannot tell you what buyers do with a band. We have not measured that and we will not guess.
• A band cannot be compared across currencies without a conversion date, and a conversion date is almost never printed.
• The crawler check tells you what one fetch received, not how any particular system indexed your site.
• Our three pricing findings are one company in one sector. They are strong enough to act on as a warning and too narrow to be a rate.
• Nothing here promises a position in an AI answer.

Sources and change log

Sources. The twelve field sheet and the checks are ours. The three pricing findings and the 1 of 18 come from the clawlaw.in programme, recorded in Tier_1/GEO_BASELINE_RESULTS_2026-07-27.md, Tier_1/GEO_GAP_ANALYSIS_2026-08-18.md and Tier_1/claude_response_17_09_audit.md. The retraction observation comes from the aiknowsus.com audit of September 2026 across 24 batches and 72 conversations. No platform documentation is paraphrased here and no price appears here.

Change log. 29 September 2026, first publication, stating that no dated pricing display check has been made. When it is made, this section will carry the source pages, the read date, the scale as the page states it, who sets the level, and the currency the definitions are expressed in. Every correction is noted here.

Common questions

Should we publish a real price if the directory only shows a band?

Yes, on your own site, with the unit, the billing basis, what is included and excluded, and the date. On 17 September 2026 Claude explicitly named price transparency as part of why it ordered vendors as it did in a coverage question. A band on somebody else's page does not give a buyer or a machine anything to quote.

What if our pricing is genuinely custom?

Publish the structure instead of a single figure: what the price depends on, a worked band against a defined scope, the minimum commitment, and what is never included. That is quotable and true. "Contact us" is neither, and it hands the answer to whoever else has written about your prices.

Our directory profile shows an old price. Does that matter?

It matters more than most vendors expect, because a buyer reading two of your public pages will believe the cheaper one and an assistant may point out the difference. That happened to clawlaw.in on 6 August 2026, when ChatGPT noticed the website and the app store listing disagreed and said so in its answer. Fix the contradiction before you optimise anything.

Can we leave the pricing field blank?

You can, and then the platform and every other page about you decides what buyers believe your product costs. Whether the platform fills it for you, and how, is something to look up on its current help page and write down with the date.

How do we keep all these pages consistent?

One sheet with the twelve fields above, one owner per row, and a quarterly recheck. Consistency is not a writing problem, it is a record keeping problem, and the sheet is the record.

Is listing on several directories better than one?

More public pages carrying your facts is generally better, and each one is another price list to keep consistent. In the one sector we measured, none of these sources reached the answer: 0 of 6 questions in Claude's run on 17 September 2026. Add them for buyers, keep them accurate, and do not count on them to win the AI answer.

What to do first

Fetch your own pricing page without scripts today and read what comes back. If the prices are not in it, that is the most valuable hour of work available to you this week. Then build the twelve field sheet, list every public place your price appears, and fix the first contradiction you find.