How we verify a number before we print it
Every price and every spec on this site carries the date it was checked and the kind of source it came from. If a claim cannot be traced back to a source we can name, it does not get published — we print the absence instead, and say why.
Method last reviewed 26 July 2026.
The three source rungs
Every row in our price index is stamped with one of three source types. They are not interchangeable, and the cheapest number is almost never the most reliable one.
| Rung | What it is | What it cannot tell you |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Dealer survey | What a named dealer quotes for the item, in a named city, on a named date. | Whether that quote holds at volume, or whether the stock is documented. Ask both. |
| 2. Retailer listing | A published price on a retailer or marketplace page, with the page’s own date where it carries one. | Whether the item is in stock, or whether the price is a struck-through list price rather than a street price. We have caught both. |
| 3. Official price list | The manufacturer, importer or regulator publishing its own figure — a datasheet, a price list, a scheme notification. | What anyone actually pays. Official lists in Pakistan routinely sit above and below the street. |
Where we survey
Each price row records the city it was gathered in — Lahore, Karachi or Islamabad — or is marked national where the figure is not city-specific. Pakistani prices vary by city, so a national figure is always the weaker of the two and is labelled as such.
We do not yet publish a dealer count per survey. The index records the city, the source type and the date, but not how many dealers a figure was drawn from. Until it does, treat every range on this site as a spread across the sources named on the page — not as a statistically sampled survey. When the count is recorded, it will appear in the caption of every price table.
The ladder a claim climbs
A claim is any number, price, spec, regulation, date or scheme status. Each one works down this ladder until it is verified or it dies.
- Our own dated research bank. The claim already exists in our market intelligence with its original source and date. We cite the original, never our own summary of it. A price older than two weeks drops down a rung; other facts drop after a quarter.
- Two independent sources. Two sources that agree, fetched and excerpted. Two reposts of the same press release count as one.
- Unblocking a blocked page. Several Pakistani retail sites refuse automated fetches — w11stop.com and jbmssolar.pk both returned HTTP 403 to us in July 2026. Rather than quote a search snippet, we fetch the page properly through an unlocking service and record the excerpt.
- Structured bulk data. Store listings, app-store ratings, map data, where a claim needs many records rather than one page.
- A second researcher re-checks.High-stakes claims — any price in a table, any regulation date, any “cheapest / best / first” superlative — get re-verified from scratch by a different researcher who is not shown the first set of sources, then the two results are compared.
- Editor approval, logged. Used sparingly, and recorded with who and when.
- Still unverified: cut. Not softened, not hedged, not published with a maybe. Cut.
The labels on our source rows
Every claim on a product page has a row in that brand’s fact-check file, and each row carries the method that verified it. Three of those labels do most of the work:
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
web_double_source | Two independent sources agree, both fetched and excerpted. Two or more URLs, no exceptions. |
primary_source | The cited page is the authoritative origin of a fact about itself — a manufacturer’s own datasheet for its own product, an app-store listing for its own rating. One URL is enough, but only for claims about that party’s own record. A manufacturer page can confirm that a brand publishes 28 service centres; it can never confirm that the service is good. |
single_source | Exactly one credible third-party source, not independently corroborated. The page must attribute it in visible text (“according to …”), and the claim stands only in that attributed form — never as a bare assertion. |
The last two labels are new. A quality pass on our first inverter batch on 26 July 2026 found 71 rows whose web_double_source label overstated what was really single-source evidence. Rather than leave the stronger label in place, we split it into two weaker, honest ones and relabelled the rows.
What gets rejected
- Two reposts of one press release presented as two sources.
- A price more than 14 days old at the moment of publishing.
- A regulation cited as active after it has been superseded. That is a hard fail, not a note.
- A rupee figure without its date in the visible text of the page.
- A claim with no verifiable source. It does not get published in any form.
The adversarial second pass
After the prices for a batch are found, a second pass deliberately tries to break them: re-fetch the sources, look for the struck-through list price, look for the sold-out badge, look for the same model sold under two names.
On the first inverter batch (20 pages, surveyed 25 July 2026) that pass refuted three first-pass prices before publication, and two pages ended up shipping with no price at all. On the solar-panel batch (25 pages, 26 July 2026), 290 claims were verified: 12 were corrected and 45 were cut or flagged as unverifiable. Those 45 are the point of the exercise.
“No verified price — here’s why”
When we cannot verify a price to the standard above, we publish the page without one. The page then explains what we looked at and why it was not good enough. A missing number with a reason is worth more to a buyer than a confident number with none.
Three live examples:
- Inverex Nitrox 6kW — the SKU is superseded by the 6.6kW and no longer has a reliable street price, so the page carries the observed spread and no headline figure.
- Inverex Nitrox 8kW — same decision, same reason.
- Risen Titan — no Pakistani street price for any Titan 650–675W panel was found at all. The figure that was circulating belonged to a different Risen panel entirely (see the correction log).
Freshness
Prices are no more than 14 days old when a page is published, and policy claims are re-verified at least every 90 days. Both dates are real dates on the page, never copied forward from the previous version. Pakistani solar prices move weekly; a page that does not tell you when it was checked is telling you nothing.
When we get it wrong
We publish the corrections. Every number we have printed and then had to change is listed, dated, with what was wrong and how it was caught, in the correction log. Claims made by other people that we found to be wrong or unsafe go in the watch ledger. Our commercial rules — no paid rankings, no hardware sales — are in the editorial policy.