Four pinned prices from China and the US, one we refused to publish, and why the same discipline applies to the number on your own invoice.
The problem: a number with no provenance
If you quote a price — to a client, for a product, for a day of consulting — the number on its own is not a fact. It is a claim with a decimal point. The moment you cannot say where it came from and when it was true, you cannot defend it: not to a client, and not to yourself three months later, when you are wondering whether you underpriced and by how much.
Engineers already have this discipline. Every dependency comes with a version and a lockfile; every figure in a dashboard traces back to a query you can rerun. A price without a source and a date is a dependency you never pinned.
So we did a small, unglamorous thing. We took four prices that all bear on one question — what does an ordinary day cost in mainland China versus the United States — and pinned each one to a source and a date. Then we went looking for a fifth number, established that it does not exist in comparable form, and left it out.
That is the whole method. It is also the product.
The four numbers we could source
The burger. About $3.47 in mainland China against $5.69 in the United States. Big Mac Index, The Economist, reported December 2025.
https://wap.eastmoney.com/a/202512163593148978.html
The doctor visit. About 50 yuan for one outpatient visit in China, about $186 in the United States. Published outpatient cost benchmarks, 2026.
https://aukawave8.gumroad.com/l/china-cost-guide
The movie ticket. US average $16.30 in 2026.
https://www.cabletv.com/entertainment/cost-of-a-movie-ticket
The rent. New York one-bedroom fair market rent, $2,655 per month. HUD FY2026 Fair Market Rent schedule.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr/fmr2026/FY2026_FMR_Schedule.pdf
Two of those four carry a trap in plain sight, and in both cases the trap is the unit.
The rent figure is a Fair Market Rent: it includes a utility allowance, and it is not an advertised rent. The movie ticket is a national average, not the price of the film you actually want to see on a Friday night. Averages are honest numbers; they simply answer a different question than the one you asked.
What a price gauge can and cannot tell you
The burger is the most quoted and the most misused of the four. What it can do is give you an implied exchange rate: roughly 4 CNY per USD on the same index, reported December 2025. You can run rough conversions in your head from that, without looking anything up, which is genuinely useful if you invoice in dollars and think in local costs.
What it cannot do is describe a life. Here is the honest caveat: a Big Mac is a manufactured good. It can be shipped, so its price answers to input costs and to trade. Rent is a local service. You cannot import a cheaper apartment from another country, so local wages, local supply and local rules set that price. Different markets, different mechanisms — and a ratio between two prices produced by different mechanisms tells you less than the two prices do on their own.
The doctor visit is the same story with a sharper edge. A clinical appointment cannot be arbitraged across a border. The clinician, the building, the staff and the rules are all local, and the price is set where the service is delivered. So the gap between 50 yuan and $186 is a fact about two local systems, not a verdict about which system is better. Anyone quoting the ratio as a verdict is answering a question nobody asked.
The number we would not publish
The obvious fifth number is the Chinese one-bedroom rent, to sit next to New York's $2,655.
No comparable published figure exists, so we did not publish one.
The reason is a unit mismatch, and it is worth understanding rather than papering over. China's published rent data are indices — movements over time — not absolute monthly levels. The commercial indices that do carry levels are quoted in yuan per square metre per month, which is not the same unit as HUD's Fair Market Rent. Multiplying a per-square-metre figure by an assumed floor area would have produced a confident-looking number with nothing underneath it. We would rather publish four numbers that hold than five that include a guess dressed up as data.
The same care applies to the medical pair. We have not verified whether the two published benchmarks cover an identical bundle of services — tests, imaging, follow-up. So read them as the price of one visit, not the price of a course of care.
Both gaps are in the published table, marked as gaps rather than filled in.
Why we published it at all
Two reasons, and the second one is the commercial one.
The first is that a table like this gets reused, cited and argued with. It is worth more with its sources attached than without them. The second is that we are a small studio that sells working files, and this was a working file: we built the sourced price table as a Notion template, one row per price, each row carrying its date, its source link, and a note on what the figure does and does not measure.
If you are comparing costs across the two markets, or you are pricing your own work and want the underlying numbers on your desk instead of in a tab you cannot cite, it is here:
China Cost Guide — $14, price listed on aukawave8.gumroad.com, Nov 2026.
https://aukawave8.gumroad.com/l/china-cost-guide
The same principle runs through the rest of the shop. We publish copy-paste prompt packs for the other half of the work — code review, schemas and API design in the Developer Productivity Pack ($29, listed Nov 2026: https://aukawave8.gumroad.com/l/developer-productivity-pack), proposals and client work in Freelancer Pro ($29, listed Nov 2026: https://aukawave8.gumroad.com/l/freelancer-pro). The file handles the mechanical part; you handle the part that is yours.
If you take one thing away
A price is a claim. A price with a date, a source and a stated unit is evidence. And a number you cannot source is not a hole in your research — it is information about the market, and it belongs in the write-up as a gap rather than as an estimate.
Pin your numbers. Say where they came from. And when a number does not exist, say that it does not exist, and leave the gap visible in the table where your readers can check it.
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