The email said 50 percent off. The pricing page said included.

A vendor sent me a renewal email with a clear offer: bundle their AI visibility add-on at fifty percent off with any paid plan.

Before acting on it I opened their pricing page. All three tiers already listed that add-on as included in the bundle, with no mention of an additional charge or a discount.

So the "fifty percent off" was not a discount against a price you would otherwise pay. It was a discount against a framing the email had created.

This is normal marketing and probably not dishonest in a legal sense. But it changes the arithmetic completely. If I had taken the email at face value I would have calculated savings against a number that does not exist on the pricing page.

I checked the actual prices too. The entry tier was about thirty-eight euros per month billed annually, the middle tier about fifty-three, and the top tier about ninety-eight. Those are real recurring costs and they are the only numbers that should go into the decision.

Then I asked what I would actually gain. Rank tracking, which the tool sells heavily, is something I already get free and with better authority from Search Console for my own properties. Keyword research likewise. The genuinely new capability was competitor backlink data, which I have no free equivalent for.

Weighed against roughly forty euros a month for a site portfolio with no revenue yet, that was not a good trade for me. I wrote down the reasoning and did not renew.

The part worth generalising is not the vendor. It is the sequence. Marketing email first, pricing page second, and never the reverse. Email copy is optimised to create a frame. The pricing page is the thing you are actually agreeing to.

The second generalisation: I wrote down why I declined, including the counter-argument. A decision recorded without its opposing case is not a decision, it is a rationalisation, and in six months I will not be able to tell which one I made.