Ratio of the 75th to the 25th percentile. A high ratio means panels selling the same nominal service are selling materially different products, usually different delivery geography, or refill included versus not.
Grouped by platform. Median is the middle price across every panel selling that service today; the 25th–75th band is where a normal buyer's options sit.
These are sold in units that do not compare per 1,000 across panels. Ranking them cheapest-first would produce a confidently wrong answer, so we do not.
Every incumbent comparison site in this niche ranks these alongside ordinary count-based services. On YouTube watch hours that produces errors of up to 8×, because the order quantity maps to a variable number of real hours.
For each canonical service we take every active offer across every panel, convert to USD per 1,000 units, and record the minimum, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile and maximum for that day, along with the number of panels in the sample. We report medians rather than averages because this market has extreme outliers in both directions: a single $14,000 geo-targeted row would drag an average into meaninglessness.
Why do you show a spread instead of one price?
Because a single number would be false precision. The gap between the 25th and 75th percentile is the honest answer to "what does this cost": it tells you the range a normal buyer actually faces. Where that band is narrow, the market agrees on what the service is worth. Where it is wide, the panels are selling materially different products under the same name, usually because of delivery geography or a refill guarantee.
Which services are excluded from the index?
Services sold in units that cannot be compared per 1,000 across panels. YouTube watch hours are the clearest case: the order quantity maps to a variable number of real hours depending on the video length a panel requires, so the same nominal rate can differ eightfold in what you receive. Live viewers are slot-hours, Discord boosts are per order, and reviews are per review. These are all still listed on their own service pages, marked as not comparable, but they do not enter a cheapest-first ranking.
Can I use this data?
Yes. The index is published under CC BY 4.0 as CSV and JSON, and through a free read API. Attribution to PanelCompare with a link is the only condition. We would rather the numbers in this market were checkable than proprietary.