Promotional rate: a price with an expiry inside it
A promotional rate is a first-period figure printed beside a plan's ordinary price. It buys the same file state for a shorter time, which makes it a fact about billing rather than about a boundary. As of 2026-09-22.
| The term | Promotional rate |
|---|---|
| What it names | A discounted first-period price for a plan |
| What it is not | The cost of keeping output unmarked |
| Where the register uses it | The prose of one reading, never a cell |
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.
1A boundary has to hold for as long as somebody pays
The paid-tier column answers what it takes to stop a mark being applied. A rate that expires answers what it takes to stop it this month. A reader who pays a promotional figure once and lapses is back to marked output, so the promotion has not moved the boundary at all.
Recording it would also make the register age badly in a way that looks like a product change. Promotions rotate on their own schedule, so a cell built on one moves every few weeks while the behaviour it describes has not moved once.
2Why it still appears in a reading
Because it is on the page, and a reader comparing crossing points will see it. A reading that recorded ten dollars a month and said nothing about the discounts printed beside it would look like it had missed something, and the next reader would reasonably wonder which figure the cell meant.
So the prose says what is printed and the cell says what holds. That split is the same one used for annual and monthly figures, and for every other case where a page offers more than one number for one boundary.
3The general rule behind it
A cell holds the value that describes the ordinary case, in the vendor's own wording, with the address and the date. Anything conditional, temporary or negotiable goes in the prose, because a register is only useful if a cell means the same thing a year later.
The same rule keeps trials out of the free-tier column where a vendor promotes one somewhere other than its pricing page, and keeps undocumented capabilities out of the control column. A cell records what is published and durable.
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: plan inheritance, trial tier, credit allowance.