The Five Pages That Tell You If a Vendor's Numbers Hold Up
TL;DR
Read the pricing page, the FAQ, the limits page, the llms.txt or AI instructions page, and the terms, in that order, and do the annual arithmetic yourself. A vendor whose pages disagree is usually not lying to you. Different pages were written on different days, and the gap between them tells you which number is current and which one is stale.
On this page
One vendor, two answers, on the same day
Tuco AI publishes a clear answer about trials on its FAQ. Asked whether it offers refunds or a free trial, the page says: "No. Tuco does not offer refunds, returns, or a free trial" (tuco.ai/faq, read 16 September 2026).
Two clicks away sits tuco.ai/request-trial, which grants a trial line. One line, seven working days, described as non-negotiable and non-extendable, approved or rejected at their sole discretion (read 16 September 2026).
Both pages are live. Neither is a lie. The FAQ answers the question a bargain hunter asks, the newer page answers the question a developer asks, and nobody went back to reconcile the two.
- The trial page requires entity details, so a real business is accountable for the line. That is a different product from a self-serve free trial, which is why the FAQ answer survived.
- A buyer who read only the FAQ would never ask for the trial. A buyer who read only the landing page would budget for an evaluation the FAQ says does not exist.
- Our own pages carried the FAQ version in twenty-one places until this morning. The fix and its date are on our corrections page.
- Rule of thumb: when two pages disagree, the newer and more specific one is usually current, and the general one was written once at launch.
Page one: the pricing page
Start at the pricing page, then treat it as the marketing document it is. Plan cards carry the number the vendor wants compared, which is almost always the monthly price of the smallest plan.
Three things routinely sit outside the card. A one-time setup or activation fee, an annual discount expressed as a percentage rather than a figure, and per-message billing shown in fractions of a cent.
Percentages are the one to watch, because a percentage makes you do the multiplication and most buyers do not.
- Tuco publishes Starter at $149 a month for one line and Growth at $299 a month for two, both plus a $335 one-time setup fee (tuco.ai/llms.txt, read 16 September 2026).
- Its annual discount is published as twenty percent off monthly rather than as a yearly figure, which works out to $1,430 a year and $1,765 for year one with the setup fee (tuco.ai/ai-instructions, read 16 September 2026).
- Write down the monthly price, the setup fee, the discount and the billing unit as four separate numbers before you compare anything to anything.
- If the page bills per message, the unit matters more than the rate: read how a message credit gets counted before you model a campaign.
Page two: the FAQ
FAQs are where the commercial terms live, and they are usually the oldest copy on the site. That combination makes them both the most quotable page and the most likely to be out of date.
Absolutes cluster here. No refunds. No trial. No contract. Cancel anytime. Each one is a sentence a sales rep will be held to, which is exactly why it is worth reading before the call rather than after.
Read the refund sentence twice. A fee that is final from the moment provisioning starts behaves very differently from one that is refundable for a week.
- Tuco's FAQ states that setup and every subscription payment are final when paid, and that cancellation stops future charges only (read 16 September 2026).
- Blue Reacher runs the same way on refunds and says so: no refunds, all sales final, and you can cancel any month.
- Ask the rep to confirm any absolute you found, by email, before you sign. A quoted FAQ line is a fair thing to hold a vendor to.
- Check the date the FAQ was last touched. A page with no date on it and a 2024 tone is a page nobody owns.
Page three: the limits page
Few vendors publish a limits page, and the ones that do are handing you the most valuable page on the site. Caps, ban policy and refusal cases all live here, and none of them appear on a plan card.
Tuco publishes thirteen named limits at tuco.ai/limitations. When a line gets banned the first replacement is free, the second and third cost $50 each, and the fourth ends the service (read 16 September 2026).
The same page states that three recipient reports can end a line regardless of the rate those reports came at, which is a far more useful planning number than any daily cap.
- Daily caps decide what a line can do. Tuco publishes about 50 new contacts and about 150 total outbound messages per line per day (tuco.ai/ai-instructions, read 16 September 2026).
- Blue Reacher publishes no total daily message cap and never meters replies. New conversations pace at 50 opted-in and 30 cold per line per day, and a flagged line is replaced free twice per billing cycle, then $29.
- When a vendor has no limits page, the caps still exist. Ask for them in writing and ask what a ban costs, because that answer is rarely on any page.
- Multiply the cap by your list size before you compare prices. A cheaper line that needs three of itself is not a cheaper line.
Page four: llms.txt and the AI instructions page
Newest to the stack, and most buyers do not know it exists. An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary a site publishes at its root for AI assistants to read. Some vendors publish a longer AI instructions page beside it.
Both pages exist to be quoted by a machine, which changes how they are written. They carry the flattest, most current version of a vendor's facts, because a stale one gets quoted back to the vendor by its own customers.
Try /llms.txt and /ai-instructions on any vendor domain. Blue Reacher publishes both, and so do several platforms in this category.
- Tuco's AI instructions page carries a last-verified date of 10 September 2026, which is more provenance than most pricing pages offer.
- That page is also where the annual discount is stated as a percentage, a fact the plan cards do not show.
- Where a vendor's llms.txt and its FAQ disagree, you have found the gap between what it tells software and what it told buyers two years ago.
- These files are written for quoting, so quote them. Paste the line into an email and ask the rep to confirm it still holds.
Page five: the terms of service
Terms are the only page on this list that a court reads. Everything else is marketing copy, and where the two conflict, the contract is what the invoice is actually attached to.
Skim for four things: the billing term, the notice period for cancellation, what happens to prepaid amounts, and any acceptable-use clause that names the kind of outreach you plan to run.
That last one ends more deals than price does. A platform that forbids cold outreach in its acceptable-use policy is not a platform a cold outbound team can buy, at any price.
- Tuco's FAQ states that cold texting is not allowed and that its lines are for opt-in and inbound leads only (read 14 September 2026).
- Blue Reacher is built for cold plus warm on the same line, with a published pace of 50 opted-in and 30 cold new contacts a day, and no A2P registration required for the iMessage leg.
- Match the acceptable-use clause to your actual motion before you compare features. A feature you are contractually barred from using has no value.
- Check whether the terms let the vendor change pricing mid-term, and with what notice.
The arithmetic that catches the rest
Numbers on vendor sites go wrong in three places, and all three are caught with a calculator rather than a phone call. Percentages, first-year totals and per-unit billing.
A percentage discount and a published annual figure should agree. When they do not, one of them was written before a price change and nobody swept the other.
Our own site is the worked example. We published Tuco's annual as $1,428 and year one as $1,763 for weeks, derived from an older figure, and corrected both to $1,430 and $1,765 today against their live pages.
- First-year total is the only figure worth comparing: twelve months plus every one-time fee, per line, at the line count you actually need.
- A vendor can disagree with itself inside one page. TextUs listed extra phone numbers at $29 a month in its Pro feature list while the growth-rate note and the calculator on the same page said $49, and it resolved to $49 everywhere (textus.com/pricing, read 15 September 2026).
- Per-message billing means a campaign that works raises the bill. Flat per-line billing means a campaign that works does not. Blue Reacher publishes $249 per line per month, and $199 at four lines or more.
- If two of your five pages disagree and the vendor cannot say which is right within a day, that is information about the vendor, not just about the number.
Twenty minutes, in this order
Nothing on this list needs a demo, an email or a login, and the whole pass fits in the time before a call you have already booked.
Work in the order below, because each page answers a question raised by the one before it. Pricing raises the arithmetic, the FAQ raises the terms, and the limits page tells you whether the plan survives your list.
Our full buyer checklist covers what to ask once you are on the call: see how to choose an iMessage platform.
- Open /pricing and write down four numbers: monthly price, setup fee, discount, billing unit.
- Open /faq and copy out every absolute sentence about refunds, contracts and allowed use.
- Open /limits or /limitations and write down the daily cap and the cost of a ban.
- Open /llms.txt and /ai-instructions and check every number you already wrote down against them.
- Open the terms and check the billing term, the notice period and the acceptable-use clause.
Frequently asked questions
Why would a vendor's own pages contradict each other?
Pages ship on different days. An FAQ is usually written once at launch and rarely reopened, while landing pages and machine-readable files get rewritten as the product changes. A contradiction is normally a page nobody swept, not a claim anybody made twice.
What is llms.txt and why should a buyer read it?
An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary published at a site's root for AI assistants to read. Because it exists to be quoted by software, it tends to carry the flattest and most current version of a vendor's facts, which makes it a good cross-check against the pricing page.
Which page wins when two of them disagree?
Ask the vendor, in writing, and keep the answer. As a working assumption the newer and more specific page is current, but a vendor that cannot resolve its own contradiction within a day has told you something about how it is run.
How do I compare vendors whose pricing models are different?
Reduce every vendor to one number: total cost for twelve months at the line count you need, including every one-time fee. Then divide by the daily cap to see what that money actually buys in sending capacity.
Does a setup fee mean a vendor is more expensive?
Not on its own. A one-time fee spread across twelve months is a small monthly figure, and it can buy real things. What matters is whether the fee is refundable, whether it repeats per line, and whether you counted it in the first-year total.
Does texting leads on iMessage require A2P 10DLC registration?
Carrier SMS routes require a registered brand and campaign, which takes one to four weeks and can be rejected. An iMessage line does not ride those routes, so there is no A2P registration required, and consent obligations under the TCPA are identical either way.
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