A letter from the founder

What we're building

I've come to believe that what Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek wrote about markets isn't philosophy so much as an engineering spec — a precise account of how a system made of millions of strangers manages to coordinate without anyone in charge. Take that seriously and it tells you exactly what to build.

The load-bearing part is the price. A price is the most honest thing a market produces. It carries knowledge no single person holds in full — who is short of what, who has a surplus, what a thing costs to make today rather than last year — compressed into one number that anyone can act on without needing to understand the thousand reasons behind it. Distort that number and you don't just move a figure; you corrupt the one signal the whole system relies on to tell the truth. This is Smith's invisible hand read literally: not a moral claim about self-interest, but a mechanical one about information.

The trouble is that in the real world, honest prices arrive obscured. They come wrapped in capacities and bundles and conditions and sticker numbers built to be compared to nothing. A drive advertises its price, not its cost per terabyte. A battery quotes a total, not its cost per watt-hour. The signal is in there, but buried — and a buried signal misallocates capital nearly as badly as a censored one. So we built an engine that digs it out. It strips every listing down to the unit that actually matters — $/TB, $/GB of VRAM, $/watt, $/watt-hour, $/gallon — and puts the true number first, cheapest honest option on top.

Seven boards, free, updated hourly

Today that runs across seven live boards, roughly 1,350 instruments, refreshed hourly — storage, GPUs, memory, energy, and more. And after careful deliberation, we decided to give the core of our engine away for free. No paywall on the boards, and I don't expect there ever to be one.

The reason is not generosity, it's integrity. The moment a benchmark's verdict is for sale, it stops being a benchmark. So there are no ads here, no paid placement, no sponsorships, and no tracking. The one way we earn anything is a referral fee when you click through and buy — which happens only when you've found a genuinely better deal and taken it. Our incentive and yours point the same direction, and there is nothing we can do to make money by steering you toward the worse option. That is the whole design, and it's non-negotiable. I've written out the full argument in why we're free.

Trismegistus — the harder thing

The free boards make the real price visible. The harder thing is reading what it means — the patterns beneath the numbers, the turns before they're obvious. That's Trismegistus: a data-analysis engine that studies the market underneath the boards, voiced day to day by our analyst, Mark. Mark is the human-readable voice; Trismegistus is the intelligence doing the reading. It's built on frontier AI, and it's coming.

The same engine reaches past markets. It also powers our early work in materials and physics — condensed-matter research where the problem is, at bottom, identical: finding the real signal inside a mountain of noisy measurements. Markets and materials turn out to be one problem wearing two costumes, and we're building one engine to read both.

If what you want is a trading bot

I should be plain about one thing, because people ask. If what you actually want is another trading bot — a program that pushes buttons with your money while you sleep — message me. I'm happy to help you build one. But they are a dime a dozen, and mostly what you'd be doing is handing your money to three firms in Amsterdam who already won that race on latency and capital you can't match. I wrote about why the retail trading-bot dream is mostly dead on arrival, and who actually gets paid: The market is saturated with trading bots. Trismegistus is the other bet — analysis you can act on with your own judgment intact, not execution that quietly makes you someone's exit liquidity.

Tell us what to price

Here's the door I most want open. If there's a market you wish you could see priced honestly — a commodity, a component, anything with a real unit and a fragmented price — drop me a line. If it makes sense, we'll point Trismegistus at it and put the board up. I mean this as more than a courtesy: the best feeds on this site will be the ones readers asked for. You know where the prices are murky better than I do, and every board we add because someone wanted it is a board that was actually needed.

That's the shape of it. Make the real price legible, give that away, and sell only the harder read on top — never the truth underneath it. If you want the full case for the free part, it's here: why we're free.

— Stephen Horton, Founder