What Kithe costs

Everything below passes the mechanical checks. These are the calls a rule cannot make, so Kithe reads the page, forms a view and hands you a draft — which you approve, edit or throw out. Nothing is ever applied to your site.

1 of these 6 run today. The rest are built and switched off: each one is only turned on once it has been measured on real sites and earns its credit. You are never charged for a tool that is off, and the tools screen says which is which before you spend anything.

• Does the alt text describe this picture?

  A rule can see that alt exists. It cannot see the photograph, so it cannot tell you the sentence is about a different one.

• Does the link text work on its own?

  “Read more” is caught by a rule because it is a stock phrase. Text that is unique but still says nothing is not, and that is the common case.

• Does the heading describe what is under it?

  Heading levels are a rule’s business. Whether a heading means anything is not.

• Can somebody follow this on the first read?

  No rule measures whether a sentence is followable. This one is read once, on a phone, by somebody in a hurry.

• Does the button’s name match what it does?

  A rule can see that a name is there. Whether it is the right name is a different question, and a confident wrong name is worse than no name at all — it is followed.

• Does the title say which page you are on?

  Every page here has a title, so every rule is satisfied on every page. That nine of them are the same title is not something a tool checking one page at a time can ever see.

Each of these costs a model request per item, so they are paid for in credits rather than folded into the plan: Free includes 20 credits a month, Starter includes 750 credits a month, Pro includes 3,000 credits a month, Organisation includes 7,500 credits a month, one credit an item, shared across every tool rather than reserved per tool. The mechanical checks never cost a credit, which is why they run first. The markup for every case is on the examples page.

Pages per scan is a ceiling, not a promise. Scanning runs on our own machines rather than in the page you are watching, so it is not racing a browser timeout: it reads a site at a polite pace, remembers where it stopped, and picks up from there next time. A site larger than the ceiling is read up to it and the screen says how many pages were read and how many are still waiting, rather than leaving you to work it out.

Without an account you get three checks a day of up to three pages, rate limited rather than metered. What each rung of the check ladder covers is set out on the examples page.