Every month i used to sink about six hours into pulling together a competitive landscape report for our email marketing clients. They wanted to see how their current platform stacked up against alternatives on pricing per 10k contacts, deliverability scores from EmailTooltester and GlockApps, and aggregate G2 satisfaction. I was doing it all in Google Sheets, screenshotting a scatter plot that looked like something from a 2014 blog post, then pasting it into a slide deck. Clients never complained, but I kept making copy-and-paste errors and dreading the first Monday of every month.

So I automated the whole thing. the report now runs on a monthly cron, scrapes current pricing pages for Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Brevo, Customer.io, Drip, Omnisend, MailerLite, and GetResponse. Even Customer.io publishes list pricing despite their enterprise lean - scrapes cleanly. The agent pulls deliverability benchmarks from public test sources, grabs G2 scores via their API, and renders everything into an interactive bubble chart (Chart.js) inside a single HTML file. Each bubble is sized by G2 review count as a rough proxy for market presence, positioned with monthly cost at the 10k contact tier on one axis and deliverability percentage on the other.

some findings from the May 2026 run. Brevo scored 93.6% deliverability - up from 90.1% three months ago - now sitting just 2.2 points behind Klaviyo's 95.8% at roughly half the cost for the same contact tier. that made me manually verify the scrape twice. MailerLite continues to be the pricing outlier, coming in under $50 a month for 10k contacts while holding a G2 score above 4.5. ActiveCampaign raised its Lite tier pricing again (third increase in 12 months) without a corresponding bump in deliverability or satisfaction - the kind of slow drift clients never notice until renewal sticker shock hits.

that last point actually led to a real conversation. One client had been on ActiveCampaign for two years and hadn't registered that their effective per-contact cost crept up 22% since they signed. I showed them the delta column in the tracker and they started a migration conversation that same week. Probably the single most useful thing the report has done, and it was a byproduct I didn't plan for.

The setup runs on a MuleRun agent with a cron schedule. i described the scrape targets, the benchmark sources, the comparison logic, and the chart layout in plain language, took about 45 minutes to get the first version right. The part that ate the most time was handling pricing pages with nonstandard markup. Omnisend loads their pricing dynamically with about four different slider states, so the scrape specifically captures the 10k contacts position rather than trying to parse every tier. Getting that one source reliable took more iteration than the other nine combined - didn't see that coming.

The other recurring challenge is full page redesigns. GetResponse overhauled their pricing page in April and broke the scrape for one cycle. I added a fallback that flags 'unable to confirm current pricing' in the table rather than silently displaying stale numbers. That ended up building more trust with clients because they could see the system being transparent about its own gaps instead of confidently showing wrong data. also, the G2 score aggregation was surprisingly annoying - some platforms have separate listings for their marketing platform product and their email marketing product. ActiveCampaign has at least three overlapping entries depending on which product line you look at. I ended up hardcoding the specific listing URLs rather than searching by name. Feels brittle, but it's held up for four months without breaking.

Below the chart there's a sortable comparison table with exact numbers, a delta column, and a flag for any platform that moved more than 10% on any metric since the prior month. The whole thing deploys as a hosted page i share via link. Clients treat it like a dashboard now rather than a static PDF. A couple have asked if they can trigger a fresh pull on demand instead of waiting for the monthly cron - I keep saying I'll set it up and keep not doing.