How I score the Enshittification Index, in plain words
A number from 0 to 100 built from four things you can check yourself: the size of the renewal cliff, dated price hikes, free-tier cuts, and whether the renewal price is printed where you buy. Every input has a date and a link.
The Enshittification Index gives each of the 45 companies I track a number from 0 to 100. The word is Cory Doctorow's; the arithmetic is mine, and it is published in full on the Index page along with a downloadable file of every input so anyone can recompute any score. This post is the same thing in plain words.
Four things, added up
- The renewal cliff (up to 40 points). How much the price jumps from intro to renewal on the worst plan I track for that company. To stop a $1.49 intro from producing a silly percentage, the intro is treated as at least $3.00 before the jump is computed. The points grow with the logarithm of the jump, so doubling the price and quadrupling it are not four times apart. If the renewal price is printed on the pricing page, the points are halved: a cliff you can see before you buy is a discount with an end date, not an ambush.
- Dated price hikes (up to 30 points). Each increase I can date and source earns points in proportion to its size, and those points fade with a two-year half-life. A 34% hike from last year still counts; one from 2019 barely does.
- Free-tier cuts (up to 15 points). Shrinking a free plan, for example halving its subscriber cap, earns points in proportion to the fraction cut, fading the same way.
- Hidden prices (up to 15 points). A renewal price shown only in the cart, a renewal price missing from the pricing page but published elsewhere, or middle tiers priced only through "contact sales". A price that used to be printed and disappears keeps its last known value on the tables and earns this flag; hiding data is a penalty here, never an exit.
The bands: 0 to 19 is a clean record, 20 to 39 mild, 40 to 59 elevated, 60 to 79 heavy, 80 and up severe. Nobody reaches heavy on the cliff alone; the top two bands require at least one dated incident.
A worked example
ChemiCloud. Its worst tracked plan jumps to nearly six times its floored intro price, an adjusted +498%. Twenty times the log of that is over 50, which the cap brings down to 40. The renewal price is printed on the page, so the 40 is halved: 20 points. No dated hikes, no free-tier cuts, no hidden prices. Score 20.0, band mild. Six other hosts land on exactly the same number for the same reason, which tells you something about how similar the standard offer is.
What it does not measure
Product quality, support, uptime, whether the company is nice. It measures documented pricing behaviour inside my observation window, which opened on 23 August 2026. A low score for a company I met last week means "no documented incidents yet", not sainthood; every row shows its observed-since date, and the scores will be restated as history accrues, in monthly editions frozen on the last day of each month.
Some of the companies on the Index pay this site a commission when a reader buys through a link. The full list of those relationships is on the disclosure page, the "alternatives" shown on company pages follow a published mechanical rule, and the inputs are downloadable precisely so that you do not have to trust me on any of this.
The figures in this post are what the pages said on the dates given. The tables linked from it are re-read every morning and may have moved since; the changes log has every move with a date and a receipt.