About PanelCompare
Where do PanelCompare’s prices come from?
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
How is a price actually captured?
By calling the panel’s own API with action=services, which returns the entire catalogue as structured JSON: service ID, name, category, rate per 1,000, min, max, and the refill and cancel flags. That is the same data the panel shows its own customers, in one request, without parsing any HTML. Most panels gate the catalogue behind an account, so scraping public pages would cover only a minority of the market.
Prices are then checked for comparability before anything is ranked, because a per-1,000 column is not comparable across every service. Watch hours, live-viewer contracts, per-order packages and per-review products are flagged as not comparable and kept out of every ranking, rather than sorted cheapest-first alongside ordinary count services; their pages list the rates and explain the unit instead.
How fresh is a price on this site?
Every table carries the timestamp of the reading it is showing, because a rate in this market can move within a week and a price with no capture date is decorative. Where a panel has not been synced recently, the age of the reading is shown rather than hidden behind a page that looks fresh.
A number with no date is not a number
Purges spike cheap-tier prices two to five times for weeks, and providers exit without notice. That is why the capture timestamp sits next to the figure everywhere on this site, and why the underlying index is published as a downloadable dataset rather than only as a table.
Think this answer is wrong?
Prices, refill terms and platform policies in this market all move, so an answer that was right in September may not be right in December. Every figure above names its source and the date it was checked; if one of them is stale or wrong, the correction process on the about page has a two-working-day reply target, and corrections are published with a dated note rather than quietly patched.