How we read and date a published price

What we record, and what we do not

This site is a record of published prices. We hold a record for 12 makers of home saunas. Each record holds the price the maker publishes, the page we read it from, and the date we read it. We record the lowest and the highest figure of the maker’s own range, and we name the model behind each figure.

We do not test saunas. We have never owned one, and nobody here has sat in one for this site. So this site carries no heat-up time from a thermometer of ours, no metered power draw, and no photograph of our own. We hold no licence to a maker photograph either. A price plate drawn from the record stands where a photograph would stand on another site.

We do not repeat a maker’s own words. We read the page and write down what it says in our own words. Where we describe a heater, a cabin size or a power supply, the figure comes from the maker’s own page. It carries the date we read it.

That makes each page a record and not a review. A review needs a reviewer who used the thing. We are a desk that reads storefronts, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

How a price gets on this site

We open the maker’s own storefront, not a seller’s. If a figure comes from anywhere else, the page names that source beside the figure. We then read the lowest and the highest published price of the range, and the model each one belongs to.

The figures go into the maker’s record with the URL and the date. From there, three rules decide whether the page can be published at all:

• A price with no read date or no source URL fails the build. The content schema rejects the record before a page is built from it.
• A claim gate reads the finished prose. Every dollar figure must resolve to a published figure the page can reach, or to a declared exemption that names its own source. It has already caught two invented figures on this project.
• The same gate refuses a superlative with nothing behind it. We test nothing, so a word like “best” needs a qualifier tying it to published material.

Discounts in this category are heavy and constant. The figure we record is what the maker showed on the day we read the page. The price you see on the day you look is often lower, and sometimes higher.

Why every price carries a date

A price with no date is a claim about today that no reader can judge. In this category the dates matter more than usual. One maker’s own product page states that the price rises every two weeks. We have read two different prices for the same sauna on the same day.

So the date sits beside the price, on the plate and in the record. Readings are only ever added. A new read is appended and the old one stays. So a page can show how a price moved, and not only where it landed.

A job re-reads the maker pages and appends the day’s figures. It runs outside the build, because a build must not depend on a maker’s server. If it reads no figure, it writes no reading: a gap in the history is recoverable, and a wrong figure is not. A move of more than a quarter is flagged for a person to read. A move that size is usually a changed page and not a changed price.

Age is the other half. The build prints the oldest read-date of every page. Our test suite refuses to pass while any published page carries a price we read more than 180 days ago. A page we cannot keep true does not stay published.

What we do when a maker publishes nothing

Some makers publish no price. They ask you to call, to fill in a form, or to find a seller. We do not estimate what those saunas cost, and we do not repeat a figure we saw in a forum.

The record still carries a reading with the date and the page we read. It simply carries no figures, and the page says the maker does not publish a price. The absence is a fact about the maker, and it is worth knowing before you write to one.

The same rule holds for a specification. Where a maker publishes no power supply, no cabin size or no heater output, the record says so. We would rather show you a gap than fill it.

How we are paid, and how that could bias us

Today we are paid nothing. No maker and no seller pays this site. We hold no affiliate relationship at this date, and no link here earns us a commission.

We plan to change that. We intend to join affiliate programmes and to earn a commission when a reader buys through a link. On the day that starts, we mark each such link on the page where it appears. The affiliate disclosure states where we stand, and it is written to be true on the day you read it.

Here is the bias that money would create. A commission is paid on a sale. We would therefore earn more from a maker that sells online than from one that does not. An expensive sauna would pay us more than a cheap one. That pull is real and we will not pretend it away.

What we do about it: no maker can pay to be included, to be placed higher, or to be described more warmly. Nothing here is sponsored, and no maker reads a page before we publish it. The order of a list comes from published figures. A maker that pays us nothing sits in the record on the same terms as any other.

If you find a figure on this site that you cannot trace to a maker’s own page, tell us. That is the one failure this whole routine exists to prevent.