Editorial policy
These are the rules every price on What Neighbors Paid passes through. They describe what the system actually does, not aspirations.
Source eligibility
A documented report must come from a publicly visible page, quote a price the writer personally paid or was personally and firmly quoted, concern one identifiable service performed in the US, and carry a job date within our freshness window. We reject ranges, hearsay, advertisements, insurance-claim totals, deposits, commercial jobs, prices from disputed or alleged-scam transactions, and prices for finishing another contractor’s abandoned work. The writer’s words are stored verbatim, with phone numbers and email addresses stripped, and never a username or identity.
Minimum report threshold
A page publishes medians, ranges, and charts only once at least eight eligible reports exist for that service and place. Below the threshold the page lists its reports but shows no statistics and asks search engines not to index it. Eligible means published, not an outlier, a real paid price (never a quote collected through the price checker), and within the freshness window; when more reports are collected than currently qualify, the page says both numbers.
Deduplication
Each source URL enters the database once, and one household’s job counts once: multiple posts or itemized figures describing the same job become a single report.
Outlier treatment
Prices far outside the statistical population for their service (more than three standard deviations in log space, computed nationally) are flagged automatically and excluded from all statistics. Implausible amounts for a service are rejected at intake.
Automated extraction and human review
Documented reports are extracted from source text with the help of an AI model, which reads the post and proposes the amount, service, and location. Its output passes rule-based validation (service match, plausibility bounds, date checks) before publication, and we audit random samples of extractions for accuracy. Posts are also vetted by hand against the eligibility rules before they enter the pipeline.
Moderation of user submissions
Anonymous submissions far above or below the local going rate, and bursts of submissions to one page, are held for manual review before publication rather than published automatically.
Corrections
If a published number is wrong — a misread price, a wrong city, a misattributed service — tell us via the contact page with a link to the affected page. We re-check the underlying report against its source and fix or remove it.
Source deletion and takedown
A weekly automated job re-visits documented sources. When the original post has been deleted, we remove the report from the site and its statistics and purge the stored text. Authors of source posts can request removal at any time via the contact page; we honor deletions of the original post without requiring a request.
Dates
Every report carries the date the work was done (or the post date when the writer gave no job date), and statistics use the job date for freshness. Pages re-render at least hourly, so a page’s contents reflect the database as of the last render rather than a manual publication date.