Publisher list price (preferred)
When a vendor publishes a per-seat / per-endpoint list price publicly, that's the source we use. Microsoft, AWS, Cloudflare, and many SaaS vendors fall here. Refresh cadence: quarterly. The source URL is recorded for every entry.
Partner-attested price
When a vendor sells exclusively through resellers + does not publish list price, we use a partner-attested rate (i.e., a number a current reseller has confirmed in writing). Used for most appliance vendors (Palo Alto, Fortinet, Cisco). Refresh cadence: semi-annual. We flag these entries in the PDF with a "partner-attested" provenance label.
Estimate based on public RFPs
When neither list price nor partner attestation is available, we use the median price across recent public RFP awards (gov, education) for the same SKU. Refresh cadence: annual. These entries carry the most cautious "estimate" provenance label.
A sample of the catalog's current pricing pass — every list price was captured and dated in one pass, and each product records that date as last_priced_at. The source type is shown per vendor; the authoritative per-product source URL lives in the manifest and is cited in your report.
Every catalog entry carries its full per-vendor manifest — source URL and refresh date included — inside the engine, and each recommendation in your report cites it.