Source policy
RobotCosts records where every figure came from, when it was retrieved and what kind of document it is. This page states what each kind of source is trusted for — and, just as importantly, what it is not.
Field by field
What each source is trusted for
| Source type | Trusted for | Not trusted for |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturer store | Current price, availability, configuration options, what is in the box | Independent performance claims |
| Manufacturer product page | List price, headline specifications, positioning | Measured performance, real-world battery life |
| Manufacturer technical documentation | Rated payload, reach, degrees of freedom, environmental limits | Price, which it rarely states and never updates |
| Manufacturer developer documentation | ROS and ROS 2 support, SDK and API availability, supported languages | Price and availability |
| Authorized distributor | Regional price, regional availability, lead time | Specifications where the manufacturer has published its own |
| Retailer and marketplace | Observed street price, stock status | Specifications, which are frequently copied and stale |
| News and trade press | Announcement dates, announced target prices, discontinuations | Current price; reporting is a snapshot, not a live figure |
| Independent community testing | Measured behaviour explicitly defined as an observed field | Rated manufacturer figures, which it does not replace |
| RobotCosts calculation | Nothing on its own — it is always labelled an estimate | Any claim presented as a fact |
How a claim is graded
Evidence classes
Independently of the document type, every observation is graded by how directly the evidence supports the claim:
- Official — the manufacturer states it about its own product.
- Authorized — a seller the manufacturer authorizes states it.
- Reported — a secondary source states it.
- RobotCosts estimate — nobody stated it; RobotCosts calculated it, and it is presented as a calculation.
Resolution considers the source type first and the evidence class second, so an official document from a lower-priority page type still outranks a reported figure.
Every value links back
Citation and retention
Each observation stores the exact URL it was read from, the date it was retrieved and the publisher. Those appear on the robot page beside the value, not buried in a footnote. A value RobotCosts cannot point at a document for is not published.
Documents are rechecked on a 120-day cycle. When a source disappears, the observation is kept with its original retrieval date rather than deleted — a price that was true in March is still evidence in September, provided the page says which month it describes.
No silent winner
When sources disagree
Where a field permits one value and two sources of comparable authority disagree, the conflict is recorded and the record is held for human review. Where a field legitimately permits several values — supported programming languages, for example — every sourced value is shown with its own citation.
The full resolution order is documented in the methodology.