About
You won't find a
headshot here
You'll find a price tag instead.
Jan Lukin writes about the systems that quietly decide what you pay.
The background is technical rather than journalistic: years spent building and running the kinds of systems this book is about — data pipelines, pricing and billing logic, the machinery that turns what a company knows about you into a number on a screen. Not at the firms named in the book. Just close enough to the pattern to recognise it in the wild, and to know which parts are ordinary engineering and which parts are a choice.
That's the whole qualification, and it's the useful one. Most writing about pricing comes from either the outraged or the vendors. This comes from someone who has read the documentation.
Checkout Math is a field guide to how dynamic and surveillance pricing actually work — written for the person on the losing end of the algorithm, not the person selling the software.
The name is a pseudonym. That's deliberate. This isn't a memoir and it isn't about building a personal brand — it's about giving readers something they can use the next time a price feels wrong. Anonymity keeps the focus where it belongs: on the tactics, not the author.
Questions about the anonymity are fair game, and get answered the same way everything else here does: directly, and without pretending there's a bigger mystery than there is. The interesting part was never the author. It's the math.
How this work is sourced
Every claim traces back to someone who published it first. This is a guide to a public record, never the original accuser — and where a claim can't be sourced, it doesn't ship as fact.
Named companies appear only with matters that have closed, or with their own public statements. That includes the cases where the consumer side lost.
Press & contact
Written interviews, email Q&As, and quote requests are welcome. No on-camera interviews or in-person events.
jan@janlukin.com (dev build — not live yet)