How much does it actually cost?
Five real things, five guesses. Slide to your answer and find out how badly you misjudged the price of a Big Mac in Switzerland.
- New puzzle every day
- No account, no ads in the way
- Works offline
Play
Your guess
The real price
Your score
The grid gives nothing away — it shows how close you were, never the items or the prices.
Round by round
Other rounds
Your statistics
How close you usually get
Play a puzzle and your statistics will appear here.
Kept on this device only. There is no account and no leaderboard — nothing is sent anywhere.
How to play
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Look at the item
You get the name, the market it is sold in and the currency. No picture of a price tag, obviously.
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Slide to your guess
The slider is logarithmic, so it moves in multiples rather than in fixed steps. That is what makes a £3 item and a £300,000 item equally guessable.
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Score on how close you got
Scoring is proportional: being out by half earns the same whether the item costs ten or ten thousand. Exactly right is 1,000 points, double or half is 250, and ten times out is 10.
About these prices
Every price here is a published one — a manufacturer's list price, an official menu price, a transport tariff or a national statistic — recorded on a stated date and credited to its source. A static site cannot know what anything costs this minute, so it does not pretend to: each answer shows where the figure came from and when it was taken.
Prices are shown — and guessed — in the currency the item is actually sold in. In the global mix an approximate value in your own currency appears underneath, converted at a dated rate: it is there to help you read the number, and it never affects the score.
Questions
Are these prices real?
They are real published prices — manufacturers' list prices, official menu prices, transport tariffs and national statistics — each shown with its source and the month it was recorded. What they are not is live: a static site has no way to check a price this minute, so every answer tells you how old the figure is and lets you judge it for yourself.
Why is the slider not evenly spaced?
Because prices are not. On an evenly spaced slider running to half a million, everything under a thousand would be crammed into the first pixel. This one multiplies instead of adding, so each equal movement of your thumb changes the price by the same proportion wherever you are on the scale.
How is the score worked out?
On the ratio between your guess and the real price, never the difference. Being £5 out on a £10 shirt is a terrible guess; being £5 out on a £50,000 car is a perfect one, and a score based on the difference could not tell those apart. Exactly right scores 1,000; out by a factor of two scores 250; out by ten scores 10.
Does everyone get the same puzzle?
Yes. The daily puzzle is derived from the date itself, so every player anywhere gets the same five items with no server handing them out. The date is UTC, and the share text carries the puzzle number, so you can always check you and your friend played the same one.
Can I see the answers in the page source?
Yes, if you go looking. The site is static, so the prices have to reach your browser to be shown, and no amount of scrambling would change that. They are not written into the page until a round is revealed, so you will not trip over them by accident — but anyone who opens the developer tools to find them has essentially decided not to play.
Is my streak stored anywhere?
Only in this browser. There is no account, no leaderboard and no server, so your statistics live in local storage on this device and nowhere else. Clearing your browser data clears them, and they do not follow you to your phone.