HL Hunt's Metro 2 software advertises $99-a-month pricing. Its own contract describes a very different number.

FinCrunch has covered HL Hunt Financial's Metro 2 Reporting Software twice this year, both times describing the company's advertised pricing: a Starter tier at $99 a month for up to 500 tradelines, a Business tier at $299 a month for up to 5,000 tradelines, and a custom-priced Enterprise tier above that. That pricing still appears on the product page at hlhunt.org/metro-2-software/, under a section headed "Simple, volume-based pricing" with the line "Pay per tradeline reported. No setup fees, no contracts."

HL Hunt's own Metro 2 Software Terms and Conditions, a separate legally binding document also posted at hlhunt.org, describe a different pricing structure entirely. Section 3.1 lists two plans: "Essential," at $2,500 a month for up to 50,000 records, with an $0.08-per-record overage fee, and "Professional," at $7,500 a month for up to 500,000 records, with a $0.03-per-record overage fee. Neither the $99 Starter tier nor the $299 Business tier named on the marketing page appears anywhere in the Terms and Conditions.

The two documents also meter usage differently. The marketing page prices access "per tradeline reported." The Terms and Conditions instead bill by "record," which Section 6.1 defines as counting each time a unique tradeline or account is processed through the software — including failed conversions, test files, and validation runs, and including the same tradeline if it is processed more than once. A customer who signs up expecting the marketing page's $99-for-500-tradelines price would, by the contract's own terms, be agreeing to a document that neither mentions that figure nor uses the same billing unit to describe usage.

The Terms and Conditions are otherwise unambiguous about what a customer who clicks through is agreeing to. The document states in a bolded header that "ALL FEES ARE NON-REFUNDABLE" with "NO EXCEPTIONS," gives a customer five business days to resolve a failed payment before suspension, and caps HL Hunt's total liability at the lesser of three months of fees paid or $2,500 — an amount that, under the same document's Essential plan, is less than a single month's subscription fee.

FinCrunch has not been able to determine which pricing structure — the marketing page's tradeline-based tiers or the Terms and Conditions' record-based plans — a new customer is actually billed under, whether the marketing page reflects a since-discontinued pricing model the company has not removed, or whether the two documents describe different products entirely. HL Hunt's site does not explain the discrepancy, and the company has not addressed it in any public materials FinCrunch has reviewed.