The newsroom
PriceProof is a record, not a feed — but a record nobody reads tells you nothing. These pieces are written from the same evidence the product pages are built on: every figure in them is checked against the public contract record before the build will publish, and an article whose numbers do not match the data does not go out.
Some of what follows a person wrote. Some of it the PriceProof Records Desk wrote: an automated desk that picks up notable new awards, researches the agency, the recipient and the product from public sources, and publishes. Those pieces are marked and carry the desk's byline, because there is no person to sign them.
Lead
-
Analysis
The federal data-platform market, in 2,368 records
We read every public contract award behind this site. Two-thirds of the money went on licences and renewals — and a handful of resellers appear on most of it.
Every piece
- Department of Commerce Awards ARCHITECHTURE SOLUTIONS LLC $1.88M for Alteryx PriceProof Records Desk The Department of Commerce obligated $1,882,075.01 to ARCHITECHTURE SOLUTIONS LLC for Alteryx through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
- The federal data-platform market, in 2,368 records We read every public contract award behind this site. Two-thirds of the money went on licences and renewals — and a handful of resellers appear on most of it.
- How we caught our own matcher inventing two products Snowplow and dbt had pages built on awards for snow-clearing equipment and psychotherapy. Here is how it happened and what now stops it.
From the PriceProof Records Desk
Every piece here began with a new award in the public record that cleared a notability bar set in advance — a large obligation, a sole offer, a first purchase by an agency, a new vehicle. The pipeline then looked up the agency, the recipient and the product in public sources, kept only facts it could quote verbatim, and wrote from those. 1 so far.
- Department of Commerce Awards ARCHITECHTURE SOLUTIONS LLC $1.88M for Alteryx The Department of Commerce obligated $1,882,075.01 to ARCHITECHTURE SOLUTIONS LLC for Alteryx through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Explainers
How to read a federal award record — written to stay useful when the figures move, which is why they are kept apart from the dated analysis above.
- A contract total is not a price — The single most common mistake in public-sector software pricing — and how to tell the two kinds of number apart in an award record.
How these pieces are made
The pipeline does the arithmetic. Every article names the product pages it draws on, and each of those pages carries its own award table with a link to USAspending for every row. The number check is not a promise — it is a gate: a dollar figure in an article that does not appear in the evidence fails the build.
The desk pieces are made the same way a reporter would work, with the checks done in code instead of by an editor. A new award is researched in public sources — the award record itself, the agency's and recipient's own records, vendor pages, reference works — and a fact extracted from any of them is kept only if its wording can be quoted back from the page it came from. The model writes from those facts and the award's evidence, and nothing else. Then the same gate that checks the hand-written pieces checks the desk's: a figure that traces nowhere, a claim about a price the record does not support, a piece that is really the product page again, or fewer than two researched sources, and it is not published. A quiet week produces nothing, and that is the intended result rather than a failure.
Nobody reads one of these before it appears. That is a deliberate choice, it is stated in the editorial policy, and it is why every desk piece tells you what it is at the top and lists what it was built from at the end.
If you want the numbers without the prose, the full dataset is available to download as CSV and JSON.