Trust is the product.
PriceAm does not treat a contributor claim, a vendor quotation or a database row as truth merely because it exists. Publication is a controlled state reached only after evidence and review.
1. Collect
An authenticated contributor records product, specification, unit, exact market, observed price, collection time and source type.
2. Evidence
A photo, receipt, invoice or supplier quotation is stored privately in Supabase Storage and linked to the observation.
3. Review
An authorised reviewer inspects the evidence, assigns confidence and can reject the claim. Every action enters the review audit trail.
4. Verify
Verification is technically blocked when no evidence exists. Verification records reviewer, time, confidence and freshness window.
5. Publish
Verification alone does not make data public. Publication is a separate admin action and creates the PriceAm card visible in the public price network.
6. Revalidate
Expired data is visibly flagged. A reviewer can mark it stale, which removes it from publication until a new observation is verified.
Non-negotiables
- Contributors cannot verify or publish their own observations.
- No observation can be verified without evidence.
- Evidence is private to authorised review, not exposed as a public receipt archive.
- Synthetic acceptance records are always visibly labelled.
- Reject and stale actions remove publication.
- Every review state change retains an audit event.
- Categories do not scale faster than validation capacity.