How this benchmark is built

Sources, rules and the things it does not claim

Where the numbers come from

Only price lists that a veterinary practice publishes on its own website. The crawler takes one host at a time, waits between requests, and reads robots.txt before it reads anything else: a host whose robots.txt disallows a price page is not read, and a host whose robots.txt cannot be fetched at all is treated as closed. It does not log in, does not touch paywalled pages, and does not copy an aggregator's data — a comparison site's figures are not evidence that a practice publishes that price.

What is stored

Every row we keep has the practice, the page URL, the date we read it and the line we read it from. A price is never estimated, interpolated or carried forward: if a practice does not publish a price, that service is missing for that practice, and it stays missing.

How a line becomes a number

• One taxonomy. 13 services with explicit matching rules; "small animal consultation", "standard consult" and "daytime appointment" are recognised as the same service, and a line that does not clearly name one of them is not counted.
• Exact prices only. "From £45" is recorded as a floor, not as a price, and does not enter a band.
• A plausible range per service. A page's other numbers (an insurance cover figure, a plan's annual total) fall outside the range and stay out of the published bands.
• A human approves each row. The review queue shows the raw line, the practice and the source URL; rows are approved, corrected or rejected there. Only approved rows feed any published figure.
• One price per practice. Each practice counts once per service, at its most recent reading, so a practice with a long price list cannot dominate a band.

What we publish, and what we deliberately do not

• A band needs at least 5 practices in a region, or 10 nationally. Below that we publish nothing, because a percentile of four prices is a rumour, and this site's figures sit next to someone's business.
• Public pages show percentile bands — never a ranking, never "X is expensive". A practice's own price is compared to its region inside its own account, where it belongs.
• Prices are as published by the practice and may have changed since the date shown; VAT treatment varies between practices and is recorded only where the page states it.
• Course length, species, animal size and whether the price includes medication all vary. The band is a market picture, not a quote.

Corrections and takedowns

If you are a practice and a row attributed to you is wrong, out of date, or you would rather not appear, write to support@algd.store with the URL. We will correct or remove the row and, where it affected a published figure, recompute the band. That is a standing offer, not a formality.

Coverage today

178 practices and 1030 published price rows from 349 pages read. The sources page lists them, and the coverage figures on this page are recomputed from the database on every request.

What this is not

It is not a price survey with a random sample: it is every list we could read politely, which skews towards practices that publish prices at all — about 3,203 of the 5,883 practices on the RCVS register according to a third party's 2026 report, a denominator we did not measure ourselves. The number of practices behind each band is printed next to it so a reader can judge it. It is not veterinary advice, and it is not a statement about the quality of any practice's medicine.