Free ways to research competitor pricing (including the hidden ones)
Public pricing is easy. The interesting question is how to find the number when a competitor gates it behind a demo request, and the answer is that it leaks in five other places.
The published price is the easy part. Anyone can open a pricing page.
The interesting problem is the competitor who has replaced their pricing with a Contact Sales button, and the equally interesting problem that even a published price is often not what anyone actually pays.
Here is where the real numbers leak, all of it free.
Review sites
People mention what they pay in reviews, constantly, usually while complaining about it.
Search a competitor on G2 or Capterra and read the negative reviews with pricing in mind. Someone will say the annual cost. Someone else will complain about a renewal increase and name the figure. It is astonishingly common and almost nobody goes looking for it.
Public procurement records
This is the underused one and it is very good.
If a company sells to government agencies, universities, or public bodies, those contracts are frequently a matter of public record. The vendor is not choosing to disclose. The buyer is legally obliged to.
So a quote-gated enterprise product with a carefully protected price list may have its actual contract value sitting in a published tender document, because somebody in a procurement office had to file it.
This works especially well for exactly the vendors most secretive about pricing, which is a pleasing irony.
Partner and reseller pages
A company can control its own pricing page. It has much less control over its resellers, integration partners, and marketplace listings.
Partners frequently publish prices the vendor would rather not have public. Marketplace listings often show a number. Check every place their product is sold that is not their own website.
Churned customers
This is the best source in existence and it is sitting in your own client list.
Someone who left a competitor and came to you knows precisely what they were paying, what discount they got, what the renewal increase was, and what the hidden costs turned out to be. They will usually tell you, in detail, because they are still annoyed.
Twenty minutes with one of these people beats a month of research. And you already have their number.
Where the line is
One caution, because the temptation here is real.
Everything above is reading things people published, or asking your own customers about their own experience. All of it is completely legitimate.
Misrepresenting who you are to get a quote, pretending to be a prospective buyer at a fake company, that is a different thing. It is deception, it crosses into territory you do not want to be in, and honestly it is not even necessary given how much leaks in public anyway.
The number is usually findable without lying. Go find it that way.