About Pricele

Pricele is a quick, free browser game you play once a day. Each day you get one country and one everyday item, and you try to guess what it costs in US dollars. You get five tries, with higher-or-lower hints after each guess, and you win if you land within 5% of the real price. Both the item and the country change at midnight your local time.

If you like Wordle or Globle, this is the same kind of thing: a short daily puzzle and a streak you'll want to keep going. When you're done you can share your result as a spoiler-free grid of squares.

There are 16 items in rotation across 49 countries. The item and the country advance on separate cycles, so the same pairing only comes back around about twice a year.

Most people have a decent sense of what things cost where they live and almost none for anywhere else. That gap is genuinely interesting: the same can of Coke, the same litre of petrol, the same cup of coffee can differ five-fold between two countries, and the reasons are rarely the obvious ones. A litre of petrol is mostly tax policy. A cappuccino is mostly rent. A kilo of apples is mostly climate and freight.

The game is the hook, but the reference pages are the point. Every price has its own page ranking every country, and every country has a page showing what a basket of ordinary things costs there: in dollars, in local currency, and in how long the average local wage takes to earn it. That last measure often reverses the ranking entirely.

Big Mac prices come from The Economist's Big Mac Index, which has collected local-currency burger prices across dozens of economies since 1986. Cappuccino, milk, egg, apple and petrol prices come from Numbeo's crowd-sourced country price rankings. Coca-Cola prices are a curated table compiled from published cost-of-living figures.

Every price on the site displays its own source and collection month. The methodology page goes through each source in detail and is candid about where the data is weak, particularly the wage estimates, which are the roughest numbers here, and fast-moving currencies like the Argentine peso, where any single conversion is contestable.

These are national averages published for general interest. Real prices vary by city, shop, brand and season. Nothing here is shopping or financial advice.

There is no account, no sign-in and no tracking of who you are. Your results, statistics and streak are stored in your own browser and never uploaded, and clearing your browser data clears them.

The site is free and carries advertising, which is shown after a puzzle is finished rather than during play. The privacy policy covers what advertising partners may collect.

Pricele is an independent side project run by one person, Flavius Cojocaru, based in Romania. editor and maintainer is the whole of the masthead: the same person picks the items and countries, pulls each figure from the source named on the methodology page, checks the conversions, writes the guides, builds the site and answers the mail.

I build and run Pricele on my own. That means I choose which items and countries go into the game, pull each price from the published source named on the methodology page, check the conversions, write the guides, and answer the mail.

I am not an economist and the site does not pretend otherwise. What I can promise is that every figure here is traceable to a named public source, that the ones I could not trace are labelled instead of quietly filled in, and that a correction sent to the address below gets read by the person who made the mistake.

If you have a question, spot a price that looks wrong, or want to suggest an item or country to add, email flaviuscojocaru19@gmail.com, find the code on GitHub, or use the contact page. Corrections are genuinely welcome. If you live somewhere covered here and a number looks off, you know better than the dataset does, and the corrections policy says what happens to a report once it arrives.

A figure needs a named public source, the same source across every country that carries the item, a unit that means the same thing everywhere, and a sanity check against its neighbours. A figure that fails any of those is left out rather than estimated, which is why the price grid has holes in it and several countries carry only two or three of the 16 items.

Guides are written and edited by hand and are not published until they say something that is not already the first result for the same question. The editorial policy sets out the full test, what we refuse to do, how corrections are handled and how the site is funded.