About this desk

This desk is written and checked by Oliver Wakefield-Smith, founder of Digital Signet. Digital Signet builds and runs a portfolio of cost and price reference sites. The work on this one is data engineering more than journalism: pulling public series through their own interfaces, holding them against each other, and refusing to publish anything that cannot be traced back to a named table.

The one line that governs the site

We do not sell heating oil, we take no supplier commissions, and we run no lead form.

That statement is repeated in the footer of every page because it is the whole competitive position rather than a disclaimer. Most of the commercial results for these searches are sellers or lead brokers. A price published by somebody who profits from the order is a price with a direction in it.

How the numbers are produced

1. 01Series are pulled through their publishers own interfaces: the EIA v2 API, the GOV.UK statistical data sets, and the state open data endpoints. Nothing is scraped from an aggregator.
2. 02Each pull records the publication date the publisher stamps on the release, not the date we ran the job.
3. 03The check date is written into the build. If it is stale, the lag mark under every figure gets longer and the staleness becomes visible to a reader without being told.
4. 04Anything that fails a source check is dropped rather than estimated. A missing figure is a gap on the page, not a modelled value.

What happens to a correction

It goes in the log at /changes with the old value, the new value, the reason, the date and a signature. That applies whether the publisher revised the series or we made the mistake. There is no version of this site where a wrong number quietly becomes a right one overnight.

How this is funded

Digital Signet funds the portfolio. There is no supplier sponsorship on this site, no affiliate link to a fuel seller, and no paid placement in the supplier pages. If that ever changes, the change goes in the revision log before it goes live, and the disclosure sits at the top of the affected page rather than in a footer.

Editorial independence, stated exactly

This site is editorially independent of every supplier named on it. Named companies are described from their own published material, from state registers and from filings, on the dates recorded. No company has reviewed a page before publication, and no company has been offered the chance to.