⟨⟨ Numery vs alternatives ⟩⟩

Most teams already have a way to build the plan. Almost nobody has a way to hold it.

Building a model is the easy half. The hard half is that it stays true in March, that finance and marketing read the same number, and that someone tells you the day your week turns over when it stops being true. Here is where the alternatives are genuinely better, and where they are not.

Numery vs an AI assistant

Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot

An AI assistant will build you a funnel model in ten minutes, and it will be a good one. The question is what happens in week six, when the model is a file on someone's laptop and the CRM has moved.

Use an AI assistant when
  • The question is one-off. "What does 30% growth cost if we double ACV?" is a ten-minute conversation, not a subscription.
  • The shape of the model is unusual — usage-based pricing, a two-sided marketplace, anything a template would fight you on.
  • You need analysis Numery does not do: cohort retention, pricing elasticity, an attribution rebuild.
  • You are still deciding what to measure. Numery is for after that is settled.
Use Numery when
  • The number is committed and someone will ask about it every month until December.
  • The rates should come from your CRM as it is today, not from what you pasted in eight weeks ago.
  • More than one person needs to see the same plan and know when it changed.
  • You want to be told you are off course before you go looking.
AI assistant Numery
Time to a first model Ten minutes An afternoon
Where the rates come from What you paste in Measured from your rows
Still current in six weeks Only if you rerun it
Locked baseline, dated amendments
Tells you unprompted when you drift You have to ask Weekly brief
Sample size behind every rate If you ask for it Always shown
Analysis outside the funnel Anything you can describe Export to CSV and go
Price $20–200/mo $390/mo

Plenty of Numery customers use both, and we would rather say so. The assistant answers the question you thought of. Numery raises the one you did not.

Numery vs the spreadsheet

Excel, Sheets

The spreadsheet is not the enemy. It is the best modelling tool ever built, and it is where most of these plans should start. It fails at one specific job: being the version of the truth nobody can quietly edit.

The spreadsheet wins on
  • Freedom. Any structure, any formula, no product team deciding what you are allowed to model.
  • The first draft. Nothing beats a blank grid for thinking out loud.
  • Sharing sideways. Everyone already has it and nobody needs a seat.
  • Price, if your own weekends are free.
Where it stops working
  • By March the plan tab has been edited eleven times and nobody remembers which change was approved.
  • The conversion rates are from a January export. Nobody has checked them since.
  • Pacing means someone rebuilding the actuals pull every week, and they stop by June.
  • A rate built on fourteen deals looks exactly like a rate built on four hundred.
Spreadsheet Numery
Freedom to model anything Templates you can edit, not a blank grid
Actuals arrive on their own
Who changed the plan, and why Version history, if you dig Every change dated and signed
Sample size beside every rate
Forecasts as ranges, not one number If you build it
Survives the person who built it leaving Rarely
Price $0 + your Sundays $390/mo

Numery exports everything to CSV, on purpose. When you need to model something we do not, take the numbers and open a spreadsheet.

See it against your own numbers.

Upload a CSV export, set the target, and compare what Numery says to whatever you are using now. An afternoon either way.

Set your plan Read a weekly brief first