# Method

Deals: acquisitions in FundingWatcher's copy of Crunchbase announced 2008-01-01 to
2025-02-23 (the last deal in the copy) where the company has a website on record and
(a) the buyer carries the `private_equity_firm` investor type (9,693 firms) or the
deal type is `lbo` or `management_buyout`, or (b) the buyer had itself been bought
that way earlier (an add-on; the private equity firm is the `owner`), or (c) the buyer
is one of these software holding companies: Bending Spoons, Constellation Software,
Volaris, Harris, Jonas, Perseus, Vela, Topicus, Lumine, Valsoft, Tiny, Banyan, Upland,
Idera. (a) and (b) are limited to Crunchbase's Software category group. Twelve
Bending Spoons deals missing from the copy were added from Wikipedia with month
precision (dated to the first of the month; year-only deals to 1 January). One row per
domain, 2,273 in all.

Captures: pass 1 queried the Wayback Machine CDX index for `<domain>/pric` and
`<domain>/plans` and kept /pricing, /plans, /prices, /price and similar paths. Pass 2
queried every domain with no match for any path of up to three segments ending in a
pricing word (pricing, prices, plans, buy, editions, packages, tarifs, preise,
prijzen, precios, priser, hinnat and others). Before: the last HTTP 200 capture of the
most captured matching path within 24 months before the announcement. After: the
latest capture on or after both 2025-01-01 and 9 months after the announcement. Every
capture was rendered with JavaScript through ScrapingBee. All other fetches went
through a rotating proxy.

Reading: Claude (claude-opus-5) read each pair of pages and returned plans, prices,
free plans, trials and a verdict under fixed definitions:
- raised: a paid plan in both captures (same tier, possibly renamed) costs more after,
  same currency and billing basis, or the cheapest paid plan costs more; none cheaper.
- hid: prices shown before; no price for plans still offered after, or the pricing
  address now shows a contact or demo page.
- raised and hid: both. cut: lower, none higher. mixed: some up, some down.
- not comparable: currency or billing basis changed, the page now belongs to another
  brand, or either capture is an error or blocked page.
Every price quoted as evidence was matched against the archived page text by script
(0 failures). For all 32 'hid' and 'raised and hid' verdicts the live pricing page was
rendered on 2026-09-27 and read again against the before capture; that second reading
is the verdict used (it changed 7).

Excluded: 2 deals by Intuit (QuickBooks, Mailchimp), a strategic buyer that Crunchbase
types as a buyout, and 1 capture that could not be read. List prices only; no control
group of companies outside private equity was checked.