Marketing copy has a specific failure mode that's easy to miss from the inside: every individual sentence is defensible, and the cumulative impression is still misleading. Nothing on Bearing's site was ever a fabricated claim. A few things were phrased to sound more generous than the actual product, and once we went looking for that pattern specifically, we found more of it than expected.
"Free forever"
The original landing page said the assessment was "free forever." That's true for the first five patterns — it is not true for the full report, which unlocks with a one-time payment. "Free forever" isn't a lie about any single fact; it's a phrase built to be remembered more generously than the actual offer, and someone reading quickly would reasonably walk away with the wrong idea about what "free" covered. It now says "free to start," which is less catchy and more accurate.
"No consultant"
A similar line promised "no account, no credit card, no consultant" as a blanket description of using the product. That's accurate for the first five free patterns. It stops being accurate the moment someone wants the full report, which does require an account and does require payment. The updated copy scopes the claim to what it's actually describing instead of letting it read as a description of the whole product.
The pattern underneath both
Neither of these was a deliberate attempt to mislead — they're the natural output of writing copy optimized for how good a single sentence sounds, without a second pass asking whether the sentence stays true once someone acts on it. That second pass is the actual fix, and it's less about any one line and more about a standing habit: read your own claims the way someone deciding whether to pay you would read them, not the way someone skimming a landing page for five seconds would.
Why this is worth writing about at all
Most companies don't publish a post about the specific ways their old copy overstated things. It felt more useful to say plainly what changed and why than to just quietly edit the page and hope no one compares the before and after — the same instinct, really, as the fix itself.