Methodology
How prices get onto this site, how we decide what to trust, and who to email when we get it wrong.
Data pipeline
A scheduled crawler fetches each tracked source — official pricing pages, docs, and public APIs — on its own cadence.
Every fetch is stored as an append-only observation, fingerprinted with a SHA-256 content hash so a later re-check can prove whether the page actually changed.
The observed price is matched against a canonical entity (provider, model, plan) in the catalog. Unmatched observations are held out rather than guessed onto the wrong row.
The new observation is diffed against the last accepted value and scored across several factors (source quality, freshness, parser confidence, change size) into a confidence score.
Small, high-confidence changes auto-approve. Large or low-confidence changes are queued for quick or manual human review before they can move the displayed price.
Approved observations are compiled into the generated data indexes the site reads from, carrying trust status, confidence, and the full evidence trail through to this page.
Verification rules & freshnesspolicy v3
A re-observed price that moves less than the auto-approve threshold updates automatically. A move at or above the manual-review threshold — or any observation the verification engine can't score confidently — is held for human review rather than published unchecked. Everything in between goes through a lighter quick-review pass.
Confidence scoring
Each observation is scored across independent factors — source quality, how recently it was captured, parser confidence, and the size of any change from the last accepted value — that add up to a confidence_score (0–100) and a high / medium / low confidence_level. You can see the exact factor breakdown for any row: expand a row in the pricing table and look under Confidence score in the Capabilities column, where each factor is listed as factor +points — reason.
Trust badges
An observation within the freshness window independently confirms the displayed price — the strongest signal on the site.
Sourced from an official page or doc, but not yet reconfirmed by a recent crawler pass. Likely accurate, not independently re-checked.
Flagged by the verification engine — a large change, low parser confidence, or missing evidence — and pending human or automatic resolution.
Source age exceeds the 90-day staleness threshold; the price may have moved since it was last checked.
Operations & contact
AICostBook only crawls and lists prices from publicly available pricing pages, docs, and APIs — nothing behind a login or NDA. This methodology and the site's data pipeline are maintained by admin@aicostbook.com. If you find a price that's wrong or out of date, email that address with the affected entry and the source URL and we'll re-verify it.