GateTrue

What each generator documents about marking its output

Cumulative grid: where absence above means nothing

A cumulative grid describes each paid plan as everything in the plan below plus a short list of additions. A feature is named once, at the tier where it starts, and inherited upward in silence. As of 2026-09-22.

Reading upward on a cumulative gridEach paid plan is described as the plan below it plus additions, so a feature named once is inherited by everything above it without being repeated. The only column whose silence carries information is the one beneath the first mention.Reading upwardThe free planBelow the first mention. Read as not carrying the line.The tier that names itWhere the feature first appears, with a price beside it. This isthe value.The tier aboveInherits silently. Its own additions list says nothing about thefeature.The top tierInherits too. Absence here is evidence of nothing whatever.One column's silence is informative; the rest is inheritance
Fig. 1 The value wanted is where a line first appears. Where it last appears is an artefact of how much the vendor chose to repeat.
How this register uses the term, and what it excludes. Written 2026-09-22.
The termCumulative grid
What it namesA grid where each plan is the one below plus additions
What it is notA matrix where every cell is filled or empty on purpose
Where the register uses itOne entry's free-tier and paid-tier readings

Inclusion rule. Words this site uses in a narrow sense, where the ordinary sense would lead a reader to misread a cell. No vendor statement appears on this page. Order. Fixed order: what the word names, what it excludes, then where it is used here.

1The reading runs upward, and stops at the first mention

On an ordinary matrix a feature is present in some columns and absent in others, and absence anywhere is exclusion. On a cumulative grid the only informative column is the one below the first mention. Everything above inherits without repetition, so silence there carries no information at all.

The value a register wants is therefore where a line first appears, never where it last appears. Reading such a grid the ordinary way produces confident errors in both directions: a feature thought withdrawn at the top, and a boundary placed at whichever tier happened to repeat it.

2Why vendors build grids this way

It is shorter, and it flatters the upper tiers by making them look like accumulations rather than alternatives. It also removes the visual embarrassment of a long column of crossed cells beside the cheapest plan, which a matrix produces automatically.

None of that is a criticism. It is a sales document doing its job, and the cost falls on anybody trying to read it as a specification. The register's answer is to name the grid shape in the reading rather than to pretend the two shapes are interchangeable.

3What it does to the maintenance of a row

A value read from a cumulative grid has to be redone whenever the vendor reorders its tiers, because the position of the first mention is the evidence. Re-confirming that a sentence is still printed is a smaller job than reconstructing which additions list a line now sits in.

That difference is recorded as the evidence class beside the value. It tells a reader how much of the row depends on the page still being laid out the way it was laid out on the reading date.

Nothing on this page is a vendor statement; the values it helps read are on the support table, with the page and the date each one was read from. See also the paid tier column, reading a plan table. Nearby terms: feature icon, negative feature line, benefit list.