The book · Book One
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Math
How surveillance pricing decides what you pay — and how to pay less.
Coming soon
What it is
A field guide for people on the losing end of the algorithm, written by someone who isn't selling the software.
Prices have always moved. What changed is that the price can now move for you specifically — and that you're the only party to the transaction who can't see the math. This book explains how that estimate gets built, teaches you to spot it in about five minutes, and walks category by category through what to actually do.
What it isn't
- Not a conspiracy book. Most price movement is ordinary — inventory, competition, timing. A reader who finishes suspecting everything has been made worse at this, not better.
- Not a promise you can opt out. You can't. There's no privacy setting that returns you to fixed posted prices.
- Not a manifesto. The policy chapter presents the industry's arguments at full strength and lets you decide.
- Not technical. No math, no equipment. Every countermeasure runs on an ordinary phone.
Contents
What's inside
Part I — Know the Game
Chapters 1–3
What surveillance pricing actually is, how your price gets built from data you handed over one piece at a time, and the five tells that mean you're being priced rather than quoted.
Part II — The Field Guide
Chapters 4–10
Airlines. Rideshare and delivery. Live events. Hotels. Groceries and the electronic shelf label. E-commerce. Gas and utilities. Same structure each time: how the game works, what it costs you, ranked countermeasures, when to walk away.
Part III — Your Toolkit
Chapters 11–14
The habits that work everywhere: digital hygiene, timing, the negotiation scripts, and building the one thing no company can revoke — your own price book.
Part IV — Beyond the Individual
Chapters 15–17
When to escalate a bad transaction and where to take it, what collective pressure actually accomplishes, and what's worth demanding — with the industry's case made honestly.
It ends with a one-page cheat sheet, designed to be photographed. You can have that part now.
How this book handles evidence
Every claim traces to someone who published it first
This is a guide to a public record, not a revelation of a secret one. Every anecdote and factual claim needs a public source, and confirmation that we weren't the first to report it — if nothing public predates us, it doesn't ship as fact.
Companies are named only in connection with matters that have closed — settled, decided, or dismissed — or with statements they've made publicly about themselves. Cases still being fought are deliberately left out, including ones that would help the argument. The book shows you how to look up what's live yourself.
That includes reporting the cases where the consumer side lost. A book arguing that algorithmic pricing deserves scrutiny owes you the ones where that theory was tested and failed.