State what the product does not do in plain sentences, on the pages where a buyer would otherwise assume it does, close to the claim the limit qualifies, and say what customers do instead. A clear limit may turn away some poor-fit leads, and our working hypothesis is that it also saves some of the sales calls, failed trials, and early cancellations that a vague page invites. Keep each limit dated and owned, because limits change as the product ships.
Every software team knows its product's limits. Solutions engineers explain them on the second call, support answers tickets about them every week, and lost-deal notes record them. The website is often the only place they are missing, so a buyer finds the limit late, after the trial is set up, and reads the silence as concealment.
This is a content-planning question for software owners and marketing leads, not legal advice. Your counsel decides how disclosure rules apply to your pages. Plan-based limits belong with pricing, which our page on explaining plans and limits on pricing pages covers; this page is about what the product does not do on any plan. For the wider page set, see our software and SaaS content guide.
The kinds of limits worth writing down
Not every limit is the same, and each kind belongs in a different place on the site.
| Kind of limit | Fictional example | Where it belongs |
|---|---|---|
| Not supported at all | No on-premises deployment | Product overview and security page |
| Supported with conditions | Calendar sync runs every 15 minutes, not instantly | The feature page, beside the sync claim |
| Handled by a partner | Payroll runs through a connected payroll provider | Integration page and the feature page |
| Out of scope by design | The product does not do accounting | Homepage fit statement and use-case pages |
| Under consideration | Offline mode | Nowhere as a promise; see the last section |
Feature grids hide most of these. A missing checkmark is not an explanation, since the buyer cannot tell whether the feature is absent, partial, or available another way. A sentence can. "Calendar sync runs every 15 minutes" tells a scheduling team whether the product works for them, where a blank cell only tells them to ask.
Put the limit next to the claim it qualifies
Limits buried on a separate page do little for a buyer reading a feature page. FTC staff guidance on digital advertising disclosures says "Disclosures should be placed as close as possible to the claim they qualify." The same guidance draws a firm line: "A disclosure can only qualify or limit a claim to avoid a misleading impression. It cannot cure a false claim." Where a disclosure contradicts a material claim, it says the claim itself must be modified.
That gives a simple editing rule. If the headline says "works offline" and the fine print says only the mobile app works offline, and only to view records, the headline is the problem. Rewrite it to say what is true ("view records offline in the mobile app") rather than adding a longer footnote. The guidance dates from 2013 and was written for advertising, so treat it as a principle for your counsel to apply, not a checklist for every product page.
Where the limits come from
A useful limits list is built from records, not from a brainstorm. Pull support tickets tagged as feature requests or "not supported," lost-deal notes that name a missing capability, and the questions solutions engineers answer on technical calls. Group them by how often they come up and how often they end a deal. Wording matters as much as the list. State each limit as a plain fact about the product, not an apology, and pair it with the alternative in the same sentence where you can: reports export to CSV and PDF, and there is no direct export to slide decks, so teams paste charts from the PDF. A limit written that way answers the follow-up before the buyer asks it, and gives sales the same sentence to use on calls. Marketing should not be deciding on its own what the product can and cannot do, because the people who field those questions every week already know, and a list written without them will miss the limit that actually stops deals.
For each limit, record the exact wording, what customers do instead, who confirmed it, and the date. That record becomes the source for every page that mentions the limit.
A fictional example: a limits section
Here is a hypothetical section for a fictional inventory app built for independent restaurants. It describes no real product.
What the app does not do. It does not place orders with suppliers automatically; it builds a suggested order list that a manager reviews and sends. It does not track inventory across more than one location in a single view; multi-location groups use one account per location and a combined export. It does not process payroll or tips. It does not work without an internet connection, though counts entered on a tablet are saved and sent once the connection returns. Each of these was last reviewed in the current quarter.
A restaurant group with five locations learns in one paragraph that this app expects a separate account for each location, before it books a demo. That may be a lost lead, but one the sales team did not have to spend an hour on, and a better-fit buyer reads the same paragraph as a sign the company tells the truth.
Roadmap language and keeping limits current
The pressure to soften a limit usually arrives as "it's on the roadmap." Keep roadmap items off product pages as promises. If you publish them at all, label them as plans, give no dates you are not prepared to defend, and keep them on a page that says plans can change. Then review the limits list with every release. A practical prompt for the release meeting: "Did anything we shipped this cycle remove a limit we state on the site, or add one we don't?" A limit that has been fixed and still sits on the site costs deals in the other direction. Our page on what buyers ask before booking a software demo shows where limit questions tend to surface.
In Hudson South's process, the Authority Asset gathers the support, sales, and product records that document each limit. Hudson Twenty-One records how your company communicates across 21 dimensions, so a limits section sounds as direct as your best solutions engineer. Market Intelligence researches which capability questions buyers ask and which ones competing vendors avoid. AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first pages that place each limit beside the claim it qualifies.
Put your limits where buyers look for them
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- .com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising. Federal Trade Commission. Read 2026-10-16.