- Products with prices
- 55
- Cities
- 11
- Prices read
- 8 November 2026
- Exchange rates of
- 6 November 2026
Where do the prices come from?
- We read prices by hand from public shop pages, such as online grocery listings, one page at a time. Each record keeps the price as shown, the pack size, the currency, the city and the date.
- A small number of older records come from Open Prices, a crowd-sourced price database run by Open Food Facts contributors and available under the Open Database License. They're too old to be used in current comparisons.
- A search-engine snippet is never used as a price. The page itself must have been opened.
- We keep shop, supplier and brand names in our records so prices can be traced, but we never show them.
Which prices count as usable?
- A price is current if we read it within the last 30 days (14 for eggs). If a product has none, an older price (up to 60 days, or 21 for eggs) may be used and is labelled as older. Anything older isn't used.
- Promotional, members-only and out-of-stock prices are left out.
- Pack sizes are converted to a reference unit (per kg, per litre, per piece), and the original pack price is kept.
- Wholesale prices, official averages and shelf prices are never mixed.
Is it the same product, or only comparable?
- Every price is assigned to one local product type. We never merge types automatically: jasmine, white and basmati rice are different types.
- Exact match: the same product line and pack size in both countries, checked by one person.
- Comparable: the same local type with different brands or pack sizes. We use the median of the current prices.
- A comparison needs at least two independent price sources in each country, with reasonably similar prices. Otherwise we leave the product out.
How are currencies converted?
We convert budgets through the euro, using the European Central Bank's daily reference rates. The rates in use are dated 6 November 2026. Source: ECB statistics. We keep every rate as a dated snapshot and never overwrite history.
The UAE dirham isn't in the ECB's reference rates, so we use the Central Bank of the UAE's published reference rate of 3.6725 dirhams per US dollar and convert through the dollar. It's a reference rate, not the rate a bank or exchange office would give you. To get Turkish lira per dirham, for example, we take the dollar rate in lira from the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye (6 November 2026) and divide it by 3.6725. Currencies without a rate can't be used as a budget currency.
The Georgian lari and the Vietnamese dong aren't in the ECB's reference rates either. For the lari we use the National Bank of Georgia's official euro rate. For the dong we use Vietcombank's euro transfer rate: that's a commercial bank's rate, because the State Bank of Vietnam's rates could not be read. Both are saved with their date next to the ECB rates.
How are the baskets built?
The basket follows the size of your budget. Small budgets get everyday essentials, and as the budget grows, more categories join in (personal care and cleaning, clothing, home, electronics), wherever we have real prices. A category with no usable prices simply doesn't appear.
Every country's basket is built the same way. Each product first gets one standard purchase, and every further step goes to the product with the fewest purchases so far, so no single product fills the basket. No category can take more than a set share of the budget, and the basket doesn't have to use all of it. We make no assumptions about household size, nutrition or how long the basket lasts.
What are the limits?
- Coverage today: 55 products in 11 cities, collected on 8 November 2026. Groceries have the fullest coverage. Personal care, clothing, home and electronics are thinner, and not every product is covered in every country (we have no clothing prices for Dubai yet, for example). Cars and mobility aren't covered yet.
- Prices come from online listings, which can differ from in-store prices and from city to city.
- Records have not been independently reviewed by a second person.
- Quantities show what a budget could buy in standard steps. They're not a shopping list or a consumption plan.