About What We Paid
In many places a plumber, an electrician or a garage will not tell you a price until the work is done, and the price depends on what they think you can pay. Newcomers, foreigners and anyone who does not know the going rate pay more. Nobody can compare, so nothing changes.
What We Paid is a shared record of real prices, attached to the business that charged them. It exists so that the next person can look a business up before they say yes, and so that people who feel they were overcharged can check whether they were.
How it works
- Anyone can search a business and see how many prices have been reported. Once three different people have reported, the lowest, median and highest price appear.
- Signed-in members can also read what each price was for. Signing in is an email link; no password, no profile.
- Contributors, people who have added at least one price of their own, see every individual price on the site.
The gate is deliberate. The record only works if people add to it, and one honest price is a fair entry fee.
What is recorded
The business name, town, country and trade. The job, in at most 200 characters, written like a line on an invoice. The amount, currency and when. Whether a quote was given beforehand and whether a price list was shown. Nothing else.
Every description is checked before it is shown. Text that judges the provider, makes an accusation, names a person or tells a story is sent back. We record what was done and what it cost. Readers draw their own conclusions.
What is not recorded
No names of users, ever. Each person appears as a random handle. No phone numbers or street addresses of businesses. No photos, no ratings, no stars, no comments.
Accuracy
Prices are self-reported and not verified against receipts. One price per person per business, a daily cap per person, and the three-person threshold before any range is shown all limit the damage a single bad entry can do. Businesses can reply to or dispute any entry through the report form.
Who runs it
A small independent project, run at cost, funded by donations and taking no money from any business listed. The code is open source. See how this is funded.