About
Plain Reckoner helps store owners and publishers look beyond their own dashboard. Our team studies public market data and historical records, checks public pages and builds free calculators to help you test business decisions.
A wider view, with clear coverage
You can inspect a competitor’s public pages, explore published benchmarks and market data, then calculate a scenario with your own costs. Each source has its own dates, geography and sample. Our historical retail transaction study covers one UK retailer; our official retail market series describes aggregate spending. Neither reveals a competitor’s private sales or covers every store.
What is here
The working numbers behind a small web business — what sites earn from ads, what an ad network asks for before it will take you, how big a market is, what an import tax actually costs —measured, sourced or explicitly modeled, and dated. Each one states the number, how it was obtained specifically enough to repeat, and when we last checked it. Where a figure came from a published source rather than our own measurement, it says so.
That has a consequence worth stating out loud: these numbers go stale. A figure from six months ago is worse than today's, which is why every one of them carries the date it was checked. If that date is old, treat the answer as old.
How we handle being wrong
Every number we publish carries a confidence grade, and we track them the same way internally:
| Grade | Means |
|---|---|
| A★ | We measured it ourselves |
| A | A primary source — the vendor's own price list, the statute, the official filing |
| B | A source-based explanation or calculation; read the method |
| C | Directional only. A range, never a forecast. |
| ? | Genuinely unknown. We say so rather than estimating. |
Grades describe evidence provenance. A primary source can still have a small or selected sample, a historical date, or a vendor’s own assumptions. A grade is not a forecast or a guarantee that an outcome applies to your site. These labels are our own assessment, not an outside certification. Recorded source checks count supporting source records, not outside auditors.
When two sources disagree, we keep both and show the disagreement, because a conflict between two credible sources is more informative than whichever one we happened to read second. We do not quietly overwrite a number and hope nobody noticed.
How this is paid for
The tools and published research are free. Some book recommendations use affiliate links: we may earn a commission if you buy through them. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. We also plan to fund the service with clearly marked advertising and sponsorship. Ads are currently disabled. Advertisers and affiliate partners do not get to approve or change our findings.
Our team
Plain Reckoner is built and maintained by a team working on website research, data checks and free tools. We help business owners explain their offer, test their message and understand the evidence before making a decision.
We publish the sources, dates, maths and limits behind our work. A worked example is labelled as an example. A result from our data says which records it uses. We do not claim outside approval or independent checks we have not received.
For questions about the service or a published result, contact contact@plainreckoner.com or request a manual review.
How we use software and AI
We use software and AI assistance for parts of coding, drafting, translation and illustration. An AI answer alone is not evidence. We check the sources and calculations behind a published result. Translated pages are labelled, and examples are kept separate from observed data.
How we check the tools
We test the maths with known examples, zero values, missing inputs and limits. We also check typing, language changes, phone layouts and saved figures in a browser. If we find a bug, we fix it and add a check for that case.
Open worked calculation checks. These show the inputs, expected answer and current answer. They are our own checks, not an outside audit or a promise that software can never have a bug.
If a number looks wrong
Every figure here names its source and the date it was checked, so it can be verified rather than taken on trust. If one does not hold up, tell us and we will check it against the source and update the page. Email contact@plainreckoner.com.
If you found us in your server logs
Some of what is measured here comes from reading two small files that publishers already put on their sites for software to read:robots.txt, which says what automated visitors may look at, and ads.txt, which names who is allowed to sell their ad space. We read those and the front page, slowly, one site at a time, using a program that gives its name and can be turned off. What the crawler does, and how to stop it.