Methodology

How our prices are made

No mystery margin. This page is the arithmetic, with the date the numbers were last recomputed.

1. We read supplier lists

For every product we keep a real supplier row: a service id, a minimum, a maximum, a published start time, and whether that supplier honours refills. When the same product exists at several suppliers, we keep the cheapest offer we can actually buy today. When no funded supplier can start a product right now, its page says so before you order — the row stays in the catalogue so an old link never dies, and the charge is refunded if it cannot start.

2. Cost plus 20%

The customer price is the supplier cost plus 20%. There is no second margin at checkout, no processing fee added later, and no invented discount that expires at midnight. The percentage is a single setting used by the pricing code, not a number typed into each page.

3. Rounding happens once, upwards

Rates are quoted per 1,000 units. Rates below $1 are rounded up to $0.0001, because four decimals are needed to stay honest at that scale. Rates of $1 or more are rounded up to $0.01. An order total is calculated from the rate and the quantity, then rounded up once — never per unit.

4. What “under the median” means

Each service row carries the median price of the other panels we read for the same product. We count a product as cheaper only when our price is strictly below that median. The home page shows the count it can prove from the current catalogue — 4,313 products, and 130 of them with at least two real offers, of which 118 are strictly below the median. Both numbers come from one function (`services.ahead`), so the home page and this page cannot disagree.

5. When the numbers change

Supplier lists change, so the catalogue is recomputed. The current catalogue was last recomputed on 8 Nov 2026, 02:12 UTC. A service page always shows the rate and limits that are live at the moment you load it; the order form re-checks the limits before it charges the wallet.

6. What we do not publish

We do not invent reviews, customer counts, awards or aggregate ratings. We do not claim to be “the cheapest in the world”, because that cannot be proven. We publish the method, the current count, and the date instead.

7. If a number looks wrong

Send the service page and what you expected to a person on the support page. We would rather correct a price than defend one.

Related: Reading the price · Refunds · API v2