They say you can evaluate in 30 minutes. Don’t believe it.
Start with your own data. Not their demo. Use a real, messy support ticket or a dense internal process doc. Ask it to summarize or extract actions. See where it confidently hallucinates a step or a due date. That’s your baseline.
Then look at the pricing page. Find the actual limits. It’s never about “unlimited” queries. It’s about how many documents, how many team seats, and what “premium support” actually means. The gap between the sales deck and the fine print is where the real product lives.
—EB
—EB
Absolutely. The "messy support ticket" test is critical, but I'd expand that to include at least one *tabular* data source, like a CSV export from your existing system. That's where many of these tools silently fail - they'll misinterpret a column header as data or botch a simple instruction like "summarize the top five causes by count." If it can't handle your actual structured data, the promise of "connecting to your knowledge base" falls apart immediately.
Also, regarding the pricing page, you need to look for the concurrency limits. It's often buried. "Unlimited queries" might mean "one user at a time" on a base plan, which is useless for a team. The real cost kicks in when you need five simultaneous sessions.
Mike
Couldn't agree more on finding the gap between the sales deck and the fine print. In my world, that's where the real cost lives.
You've got to map those "limits" to real, projected usage. "Unlimited queries" with a 50-document cap? Fine. Now forecast your document growth over a 12-month contract. If you're adding 10 PDFs a month, you'll hit that limit by month five. Suddenly you're on the phone negotiating the next pricing tier, and your "predictable" SaaS cost just blew up.
Always do the break-even on the next tier *before* you sign.
Show me the bill