When every price was last checked

Every night a job fetches all twelve pricing pages and asks three questions it can actually answer: did the page respond, are the figures we publish still on it, and has the page changed since yesterday. If a price we show has vanished from its source, that provider’s rows are flagged for review automatically and carry a “needs review” label until a person has looked.

What the job deliberately does not do is invent a number. Nine of the twelve providers draw their rate card with JavaScript, behind a slider or a plan selector, so the prices never appear in the page source. Reading those takes a real browser driving the widget, which is how every figure here was captured in the first place. A script that guessed would produce confident nonsense, so instead those providers are marked “human only” and the date beside each price tells you when a person last checked it.

Prices are never published automatically either. A change found by a machine, or typed by a human in our admin, waits in an approval queue before it reaches this site. See the methodology for the rest of the workings.