About PriceProof
PriceProof exists to answer a question that enterprise software buyers find surprisingly hard to answer: what does this product actually cost?
Vendors publish list prices when it suits them and route everything else to a sales call. Analyst firms publish ranges behind a subscription. What is left in public — genuinely, verifiably public — is the record of what government agencies paid. Those records sit in USAspending.gov: award IDs, recipients, awarding agencies, dollar amounts, action dates. They are free to read, they are official, and almost nobody reads them.
We read them, for one category at a time, product by product.
What we publish
Every product page shows the same things: how many distinct public awards name that product, which agencies awarded them, the amounts, and the range those amounts fall in. Where the vendor publishes a list price, we show it next to the observed figures so you can see the gap. Where the vendor does not publish one, we say so rather than guess.
Every single figure carries its type — contract total, stated unit price, derived unit price, or vendor list price — printed next to the number. That labelling is the whole point. A seven-figure award for "software implementation services" is not the price of a licence, and a site that presents it as one is not giving you evidence, it is giving you a number that looks impressive. We would rather show you fewer figures that mean something.
What we do not do
We do not estimate. We do not average contract totals and call the result a price. We do not use analyst reports, leaked price lists, vendor NDAs, or anything behind a paywall. We do not publish a page about a product that does not have enough public evidence to support one — if the records are too thin, the product gets no page and the reason is recorded. We do not accept payment, sponsorship or affiliate commission from any vendor mentioned on this site, and we will not.
How the site is produced
This is a data pipeline, not a newsroom. Award data is pulled from the USAspending API, cached, filtered with federal classification codes, matched against a curated list of product aliases with whole-word rules, and assembled into evidence files. The figures on every page are computed by code from those files — never chosen, typed, or adjusted by hand.
An AI language model writes some of the prose: the opening sentences, the renewal notes and the FAQ answers, working strictly from the evidence file for that product. It is not permitted to introduce a number, an agency, a vendor or an award that is not already in that file, and every number it writes is checked against the file before the page is allowed to build. If a sentence fails that check it is rewritten, and if it fails again it is dropped. The full procedure, including its limits, is on the methodology page, and the disclosure of how AI is used is on the editorial policy page.
Who is responsible
The publisher
Lars Cornelissen — data engineer and publisher.
Lars is a data engineer who has worked with enterprise data platforms in production: warehouses, lakehouses, streaming systems and the licensing negotiations that come with them. He built PriceProof after repeatedly watching the same thing happen — a buyer asking what a platform costs and getting a number that turned out to describe something else entirely. His interest here is not in criticising vendors. It is in the much narrower claim that a public record exists, that it is readable, and that reading it changes the conversation.
PriceProof is edited and published by Lars. He is accountable for what appears here, including the parts written by the writing layer, and he is the person to contact when something is wrong. The site is published at price-proof.com and the editorial address is [email protected].
Corrections are welcome, and the process for them is set out on the editorial policy page. If a figure here is wrong, we want to know: the entire value of this site depends on the figures being right, and a correction that improves one page improves every page that cites the same record.