Surveillance pricing · field guide
The price isn't the price
Two people buy the same thing, on the same day, and pay different amounts. Increasingly the difference isn't when you bought — it's who the system thinks you are.
Free. No account. Nothing to install.
Tap the tag
Two people, same item, same minute. Only one of them sees this sticker peel back.
This is documented, not theoretical
It already happened
Every case below was reported publicly by journalists, researchers, or the companies themselves — years ago. This site is a guide to that record, not an accusation.
A major online retailer showed different customers different prices for the same DVDs. The company called it a random price test, ended it, and refunded the difference.
Company's own accountA travel site found Mac users spent more per night on hotels — and began steering them toward pricier options. Note the precision: it changed which hotels appeared first, not the price of the same room.
Wall Street JournalOnline tutoring prices varied by ZIP code by roughly a factor of two. Asian families were nearly twice as likely to be quoted the higher price — no rule about race required.
ProPublicaStart here
Are you being priced?
Five questions. Sixty seconds. It tells you whether what you're looking at right now is worth five more minutes of checking — and exactly which checks to run.
- Price changed since you last looked
- Different on another device or logged out
- Countdown timer or "X left" banner
- Only visible in-app or logged in
- Feels urgent — and you can't say why
Free download
The Surveillance Pricing Cheat Sheet
One page. The 5 tells, the 3 tests, the 10 countermeasures with the highest dollar return, and the escalation ladder. Built to be photographed and kept on your phone.
The book · Book One of the Math series
Checkout Math
How dynamic pricing rigs the game — and how to beat it. A field guide across airlines, rideshare, ticketing, hotels, groceries, e-commerce, and utilities: what's being done to you, and what to do about it.
Not a conspiracy book. Most price movement is ordinary, and the book says so — the goal is being able to tell one thing from another, and to stop being the profile that pays more.
Coming soon
Newsletter
When a price moves, you'll hear why
Occasional notes on how pricing actually works, what changed in the law, and which tactics stopped working. No spam, no affiliate links.
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