About

RenewalCliff is one person and a set of scripts. The scripts read subscription pricing pages every morning and write down what they say. I write the posts, read the pages the scripts cannot, and answer the mail.

It started on 23 August 2026 with one annoyance. Every hosting comparison shows the $2.99 intro price and buries the $9.99 renewal. I wanted the table that shows both, the exact sentence where the renewal price is stated, and the total over the years you will actually keep the plan. Then I found the same pattern in email tools, and that some companies were getting more expensive in dated, documented steps. Counting those steps became the Enshittification Index. Writing down what the checks run into became the log.

What runs every morning

At 06:17 UTC (with a second slot at 13:47 in case the first is late, which happens) a scheduled job fetches the public pricing pages of 27 web hosts and 18 email tools from a server in the United States, and compares every price with the day before. A change is published only after a second check on a later day confirms it, so a one-day glitch never becomes a headline. When a page refuses the job, it reads the Internet Archive's newest capture of the same page instead and says so. Source pages keep a receipt in the archive, so every number here can be checked against a copy someone else holds. Then the whole site is rebuilt and published; the line under the site name says how many pages were re-checked that morning. If the job fails, the site keeps the last verified data, and the footer shows the date of the last successful build.

What I do not do

No reviews and no "best of" lists. The only ranking is arithmetic.
No prices I have not seen on the vendor's own page, from the United States, with a date. I live in Mexico, and a pricing page seen from here is often not the page a US customer sees, so my own browser is never a source.
No scores without receipts. Every Index input links its source.
No paid placement, no display ads, no ordering by payout.
No getting past bot walls or captchas. A page that refuses the job is marked blocked, not guessed.
No adjectives where a number will do.

How the lights stay on

Some links are affiliate links, marked where they appear. When you buy through one, the vendor pays me a commission and you pay the same price. Commissions never change which prices I show, because prices are observed, not chosen. Recommendation boxes show only honor-roll companies, ordered by score, and at least one of them pays me nothing. Details are on how the site makes money; the per-company registry ships inside the downloadable Index data.

When I get it wrong

Scrapers misread pages and vendors change layouts. If a price here is wrong, tell me with the URL and the date. I re-verify the same day, fix it, and log it on the corrections page, which lists every error published so far, including the ones I found myself. I would rather publish a correction than defend a number.

Credits

"Enshittification" is Cory Doctorow's word. The arithmetic behind the Index is mine and is published in full in the methodology section. The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.