Every price on this website obeys one rule: if we can’t trace it, we don’t publish it. Here’s the whole system, in plain English.
Two numbers, always
Travel sites love one cheap number. We show two: the cheapest thing advertised, and the cheapest place that passes the Uncle Standard — private bathroom, walkable to food and transit, decent building, real desk and wifi. The gap between those numbers is the most useful fact in travel budgeting, and almost nobody prints it.
Where the numbers come from
An AI research staff sweeps 53 Asian cities every month — real listings, sourced, dated. A listing only counts if it shows real photos and an address. Fewer than three qualifying listings? We print INSUFFICIENT DATA instead of a guess. Every published figure carries its check date and an honesty label like “first reading — confidence still building.”
The machine checks itself
Nine automatic tripwires audit the data: too-small samples, suspicious gaps, sudden price jumps, numbers that contradict Uncle’s on-the-ground research, and — monthly — whether what the website says still matches what the data says. A watchdog checks every morning that the research actually ran. When something trips, a human looks before anything publishes. And the machine only checks what a machine can honestly check: it hands Uncle a shortlist worth walking to, and the things no listing can prove — whether a place is quiet at night, whether the light is real — he confirms on foot. We’d rather hand you a shorter list than a confident guess. How we found the holes in our own rules is its own story.
The human outranks the machine
Uncle hand-checks cities against the live market. When his eyes and the machine disagree by more than 20%, the machine’s method gets fixed — not his judgment. And some things never get automated at all: no bookings, no payments, no financial advice. The AI researches; the human decides.
When we’re wrong, we say so — in public
We once published a rent figure that measured the wrong thing. Instead of quietly fixing it, we wrote a whole confession and left the record standing. That’s the policy: corrections happen in the open, and the old number stays in the story so you can see exactly what changed and why.
Boomer’s note: “Most websites ask you to trust them. We’d rather show you the leash laws we put on ourselves. I wrote most of them. Naturally they’re excellent.”
Questions about a specific number? Ask us — every figure has a paper trail, and we’ll show it to you.