A ledger of everyday prices, kept in the open.

Where the numbers come from

Grocery and energy prices are the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average price data: monthly U.S. city averages collected for the Consumer Price Index. We use 53 series that are still published and that people actually buy, from eggs to heating oil. The newest month is September 2026, released Oct 14, 2026; October 2026 prices are due Nov. 10, 2026.

Today’s dollars come from the CPI for all urban consumers (CPI-U, all items, not seasonally adjusted). We multiply each month’s price by CPI-U for Sep 2026 and divide by CPI-U for that month.

Phone plans, streaming prices and store policies come only from each company’s own plan, help and policy pages, read in Oct 2026. Third-party articles never count as a source. Where we did arithmetic, the page says “our math”.

What we don’t do

No paid placement, no sponsored rankings and, for now, no affiliate links. If we ever add referral links, they will be labeled on the page where they appear and listed here first. We don’t cover credit cards, government benefits, business software or investing.

How the site is made

The pages, charts and tables are written and drawn by go4 with AI assistance (Claude, by Anthropic). Every number is computed by code from the data files above, and the plan and policy summaries are checked against the linked pages. Charts are drawn from the data, not copied.

Coming next

Receipts from the archive: what specific shelf items cost in past years, from archived store pages, linked to the archive copy so you can check them yourself.

Corrections

A contact address is on its way with the site’s own domain. Until then, the data files are public sources you can check line by line: every price page links its BLS series and offers a CSV.