01Reading
Read at source, every week
Once a week we visit each seller's own pages and read the price it publishes for each of our standard specs. We store one row per seller, spec and price type, with the page it came from and the date. Old readings are kept, never edited, so a price's history stays on record.
We read only what a seller publishes for anyone to see. We respect each site's robots.txt and its terms: 10 sellers allow automated reading, and 6 sellers whose terms do not are read by hand. We never fill in quote forms, postcodes or accounts to get a price.
A seller is called cheapest only on a reading from the latest weekly run, never from memory or a news article.
02Price types
Every price says what kind it is
Different kinds of price are never compared as if they were the same thing.
- From
- The seller's advertised starting price.
- Fixed price
- A fixed price for our standard spec, published on the seller's page or given by its online quote.
- Typical
- The seller's own published typical or average price.
- Before grant and after grant
- Some sellers publish a heat pump price with a grant already taken off. Every price says whether it is before or after a grant, and which grant; the two are never put side by side without saying so. Grants differ by nation, so each grant names where it applies.
03Like for like
Standard specs
A seller's price is matched to a spec by its stated size and scope, never by price. A price outside every spec is stored but kept off the comparisons.
04The index
How the weekly figure is worked out
For each spec we take every seller's latest price of one type and grant state, read in the last 14 days, and publish the lowest, the highest, the median and the number of sellers. With fewer than 3 sellers we show the list without a median.
A price older than 14 days drops out of the index and shows as "not checked recently". Lists are sorted by price, then by the date we read it.
05Money
How we make money
Some links to sellers may earn FittedPrice a commission if you buy. It never changes the order: paying and non-paying sellers sit in the same list, sorted by price and then by the date we read it, and the line above every list of prices says so.
We never arrange finance or pass you to a lender. Where a seller offers its own finance we may mention it as a fact, never as a recommendation. We ask for no personal details: there are no forms on this site.
06Editorial policy
Who writes this, and how
Pages are written and checked by FittedPrice Studio. Every figure comes from a stored reading or an official page, with its date, and every page lists its sources at the foot. Grants are checked on gov.uk or the nation's own official scheme page.
When a seller changes its price, the next weekly run records the new one beside the old; we do not rewrite history. A page names the date of its latest reading.