About BrickPrice — methodology and editorial policy

What BrickPrice is

BrickPrice is an independent European LEGO price tracker. It compares current and historical prices for ~1,000 LEGO sets across 35+ retailers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. It is not affiliated with the LEGO Group.

How prices are collected

Prices are collected by an automated scraper that runs on a schedule:

• Active sets (currently in production, on sale, or with recent price changes) — refreshed every 12 hours.
• All other tracked sets — refreshed daily.
• Sale-flagged retailers (during clearance windows) — refreshed hourly to catch flash discounts.

Each scrape stores the price as a new row in price_history, never overwriting historical data. This is what makes the all-time-low indicator and the price chart on every set detail page possible.

Set metadata (piece count, theme, retirement status, RRP) comes from Brickeconomy and inventory data from Rebrickable. Both are credited as sources where their data is shown.

How data is verified

Three monitors run continuously:

1. A synthetic transaction every 24 hours walks the full path homepage → set detail → outbound retailer redirect, and fails the build if any step breaks.
2. An affiliate-link sampler picks 100 active retailer rows daily and verifies each redirect lands on a non-BrickPrice URL.
3. A freshness check confirms current_prices.last_updated is under 24 hours and price_history.captured_at is under 48 hours.

Failures open a GitHub Issue tagged site-health. The current_prices.last_updated timestamp is shown next to every price on every set detail page.

Editorial independence

• The comparison table on every set page sorts by price, always. Affiliate commission has no effect on order.
• A retailer cannot pay to be listed, omitted, or moved up.
• Affiliate links are disclosed inline above every comparison table and on a dedicated Affiliate Disclosure page.
• The price you pay at the retailer is the same with or without our affiliate link.

Who runs BrickPrice

BrickPrice is run by Tingyao Chang, an EU-based independent developer. The site is built on Next.js, hosted on Vercel, with a Supabase database and a separate Python scraper. The full architecture is documented in docs/SPEC_*.md in the project repository.

Contact

Questions, corrections, retailer onboarding, or press requests: [email protected]. Replies typically within 2 business days.

Limitations — what BrickPrice does not track

• Used or second-hand markets (BrickLink, eBay, Marketplace listings).
• Region exchange rate fluctuations on the day-of (prices are stored in their listed retailer currency).
• Retailers outside the seven covered countries.
• Bundle deals, gift-with-purchase promotions, or LEGO VIP rewards.
• Stock availability — a price is shown if it was visible on the retailer's product page at the last scrape, not whether the item is in stock right now.

If a retailer or country you'd like covered is missing, email us.