The Wall Check

The five walls

Price wall

The free tier ends. The limit you hit while everything still looks free.

Permission wall

You can see the setting but not touch it. Licenses and admin roles decide what you control.

Gate wall

A human at the vendor decides your timeline — approvals, reviews, onboarding queues.

Meter wall

Cost scales with your success. Per-unit, per-seat, per-message pricing that grows as you do.

Exit wall

Getting out costs more than getting in. Your data, your domain, your number — who keeps them.

The twelve questions

1. What is the hard number where the free tier ends?
2. Which settings need a paid plan to change, not just view?
3. Is there an admin or owner role we would not hold?
4. Does anything need approval by a human at the vendor?
5. What do the forum’s newest posts say about real queue time?
6. What does a busy month actually cost at per-unit pricing?
7. Are there per-seat, per-line, or per-number add-on fees?
8. What third-party taxes ride on top (carrier fees, registrations)?
9. Can one real record be exported on day one — and does it open?
10. Who owns the account, the domain, the phone number?
11. If the vendor doubles its price next year, what breaks?
12. What is the free replacement, and how bad is it?

The four documents

Each check reads the same four sources — the comparison table row labels, the changelog, the forum’s newest posts, and the API limits. Twelve questions, ten minutes, before install — every time.

The money gate

Before anything gets built, four numbers get written down: a countable outcome unit — what "worked" means in a single number; the all-in monthly cost including your own hours; a firm kill number with a date on it; and the stopping cost — what it costs to walk away. A tool that can't name its four numbers isn't a project. It's a hope.

The operating rule

Price and meter walls are budget decisions — they can be planned for. Permission and gate walls are schedule decisions — they take weeks out of your hands. The rule follows: never place a gate or permission wall on the critical delivery path of a client project.

What we publish

Every vendor page shows its five walls, what we found, the source, and the date we checked it. A vendor we have not finished checking shows as pending — because a pending state is more honest than a verdict nobody ran. 73 of 73 vendors currently carry a completed check.

The gate score

Each checked vendor also carries a number from 1 to 5: how many of the five walls fired in its last check. A 1 means all five walls came back clear. A 5 means every wall fired — price, permission, gate, meter, and exit each carry a gate. The score is a count of findings, not a verdict — a 5 tells you there is no free lunch anywhere in the tool, and which gates you accept is still your call.

Scores derive from the same published findings — recount them on any vendor page. A stale check keeps its last-recorded score and says so on the page.

See every vendor we check →