How we work out coffee prices

For a price from a local: the cafe, the drink, the size, the milk if they tagged it, what they paid, and when they told us. No account is needed. We deduplicate submissions using an anonymous token in your browser and a one-way hash of your IP address. We never store raw IP addresses.

For a price from a menu: the cafe, the drink, the size, the milk, the price, the address of the page we read it from, the time we read it, a confidence score from the extraction step, and the version of the extractor that read it.

We do not collect what you buy, where you go, or anything you did not type into a submission.

When people submit the same drink and size at the same cafe, we show the median of those submissions from the last 60 days, rounded to the nearest cent. A median means one odd price cannot drag the number around the way an average would. Submissions older than 60 days drop out of the calculation.

The report count next to a community price is the number of submissions counted in that window. It includes one-tap confirmations, so it is not a count of distinct people. Two reports can be one person who came back a fortnight later and confirmed the price still held.

We recalculate the moment a price is submitted, or the moment an admin approves a submission that was held for review. There is no scheduled refresh.

Milk is optional. An untagged submission is stored with no milk type and counted into a broad all-milk figure, which is the number we use for map pins and for ranking cafes against each other. That figure mixes every milk together, so it is not a full-cream price. It cannot be submitted directly either. We derive it.

Menu prices reach us two ways. Our own crawler reads menus that cafes publish on their own websites. Separately, a cafe can send us a rate card, or our team can enter one, which expands into a price for each drink, size and milk combination it covers.

Both appear as a menu price. Where we hold the address of the page we read, the label links straight to it. A rate card entered by hand has no public page behind it, so there is no link.

Crawled prices carry an expiry date, after which we show them as outdated. Prices entered directly do not. See Limitations.

How our menu reader works, and how to opt out

A price is keyed on exactly three things: drink, size and milk. When we hold both a community price and a menu price on the same key, the community price wins. Someone paid it, and the menu can be out of date.

That is the whole rule. There is no tie-break on which price is fresher, or on how confident we are in it.

A different milk or a different size is a different key, so both prices stay on the page and stay labelled. We never fall back to a near match. A large latte with oat milk does not stand in for a large latte with full cream.

Two numbers matter here, and they do different jobs.

60 days is the window for the median. Only submissions from the last 60 days count towards a community price.

30 days is currently the point at which we start showing a community price as outdated. That threshold is a setting we can change, so read it as where we draw the line today rather than a permanent promise.

A price can sit inside one window and outside the other. A community price last confirmed 45 days ago still counts towards the median and is still shown as outdated. Anyone can confirm a price in one tap, which refreshes its recency without retyping the figure.

Every submission is checked automatically before it counts. A submission is held for a human to review on two grounds: the price sits outside the range we consider plausible for a coffee, or it sits too far from the consensus we already hold for that exact drink, size and milk.

A held submission does not move the displayed price. It stays out of the median until a person approves it, and the calculation excludes it either way.

We do not publish the exact thresholds. Publishing them would tell anyone trying to poison a price how far they can go without tripping the check.

If a price is wrong, the fastest fix is to submit what you actually paid. It counts towards the median straight away, and the next person sees a better number.

If submitting cannot fix it, use the Feedback button in the corner of any page and tell us what you saw. It comes straight to us.

Running a cafe and want us to stop reading your menu? Email hey@coffeenearme.au with the cafe name or domain, or block our crawler at the server level. The full detail is on our crawler page.

Organic rankings are not for sale. Any paid placement is clearly labelled and never changes where a cafe ranks. We do not show any today.

A cafe cannot pay to change its price data or its position. A rate card sent by a venue is labelled as a menu price like any other, and a local who paid something different still overrides it.

The price data is free, and it stays free.