Approach
The rights, freshness, and confidence rules behind every data row.
Every price, capacity signal, and provider row on ComputeTape carries an explicit evidence label. The labels are a public contract: they tell you where a value came from, how recently a human checked it, and how much weight to put on it. This page is the reference for all of them.
Rights labels
Every row in a public data surface carries a rights status. The status records the editorial review on the source itself, not on the value. A row whose rights have not been reviewed is hidden rather than shown unverified.
The row comes from an official, public retail-price page or API published by the provider. AWS and Azure on their first-party price APIs are the current examples. These rows are auto-approved on the rights status; the reviewer is recorded as automated:retail-api.
The row is collected from a publicly accessible source but the editorial rights review has not yet been completed for that provider. Pending rows are kept in the data pipeline but are not displayed on Provider Directory until a reviewer signs off.
The row is a derived aggregate (a median, a segment estimate) and has no single primary source URL. Derived rows can appear on board surfaces with the label, but they are excluded from Provider Directory because they cannot satisfy the per-row source contract.
Freshness
Provider prices and capacity signals change. A row that was reviewed once is not trustworthy forever. We keep a separate last-checked timestamp on every approved row so freshness is a human signal, not a scraper artifact.
When a reviewer most recently confirmed the source page is still valid and the row still matches it. For official-public-retail-prices rows, this is set automatically on each retail-API run.
When the scraper last loaded the value. Useful for debugging the pipeline but not a substitute for last-checked. A daily ingest does not mean a daily editorial review.
If last-checked falls more than 30 days behind the page generation time, the row falls back to hidden until a reviewer reconfirms it. The cap is a starting position; it may tighten if operational load is wrong.
Confidence
Confidence reflects how reliable a row is for planning, given the source quality, freshness, and the join used to produce it. It is a separate signal from rights status: an approved row can still be Medium confidence, and a derived aggregate can still be High.
Official provider source, recent check, and a direct read on the listed price or capacity claim. Suitable as the primary input to a planning calculation.
Recent and source-backed, but with at least one normalization step, segment-level estimate, or noisier underlying source. Useful for comparison, less so as a single-source plan.
The source is older, indirect, or the join required several assumptions. Treat as directional only and prefer a higher-confidence row when one exists.
Where the labels appear
The same labels are used everywhere they apply. When you read a number on ComputeTape, you can ask the same questions of it on any page.
Renders only rows with approvedForDisplay = true and a non-aggregate rights status. Every visible row links its source and shows its last-checked time and confidence.
Shows the full data set including derived-aggregate rows, with the label visible. Use the Provider Directory for rights-vetted rows.
Power signals carry the same source, last-checked, and confidence fields as provider data. Aggregated capacity claims are labeled, not implied.
If a row has slipped through wrong, the corrections page records the issue and the fix. Spotting one is welcome.