Methodology

This distinction is what the whole site is built on. The official price is what a public body, a regulated tariff or a supplier's price list states. The real cost is what a person ends up paying once the items that tariff does not cover are counted.

They are not the same thing and they almost never coincide. An Italian passport officially costs EUR 116.20, but applying requires two compliant photographs and a trip to the counter in person: the typical bill lands closer to EUR 138. Whenever we publish both figures, our own validation schema requires us to explain where the difference comes from.

Every number we publish is tied to a source with a URL, a publisher, a type, an authority level and an access date. This is not a good practice we aim for: it is enforced at authoring time. A guide without at least one source fails validation and cannot be published.

Our order of preference is: legislation and the Official Gazette, public bodies, regulators, suppliers' own published tariffs, universities and research institutes, established industry reports, reputable marketplaces, serious press, and verified reader reports. We never use a competitor's SEO article as evidence.

Where a price is administered we publish the exact figure. Where it is set by the market we publish a range, because an average taken across widely dispersed prices describes a situation nobody actually experiences.

We always distinguish between a fixed official price, an observed average, a market range, a starting price, a stated estimate, a reader report and an editorial calculation. These are different things, and treating them alike is the fastest way to publish a meaningless number.

Every guide carries a confidence label — High, Medium or Limited — together with an explanation of why. High confidence requires at least one source at authority level 4 or 5, and validation enforces that rather than trusting our good intentions.

Limited confidence is not a flaw. On many topics the real variation is enormous, and saying so plainly is more useful than invented precision. We do not publish meaningless reliability percentages.

We say so. Regional pages carry a required section on what we could not document: no region page can be published without declaring its own gaps.

We do not interpolate a region's figure from its neighbours, and we do not substitute a national average for a missing local one. A documented gap is information; an invented number is harm.

Every guide states when it was last verified and when its next review is due. The cadence depends on how fast the price moves: thirty days for digital price lists and energy, sixty for fuel and insurance, one hundred and eighty for amounts fixed in law.

When a guide passes its review date we flag it at the top of the page rather than hiding it. The figures remain those of the last verification, and the reader knows they are ageing.

The catalogue lives in a version-controlled repository: every change is a proposal reviewed by a person before publication, and the history is public. Automated proposals publish nothing on their own.

If you believe one of our figures is wrong, write to info@quantocostadavvero.it with the source that proves it. We correct it and record the change in that guide's revision history.