The mid-price checklist I use so a competitor price sheet stays honest

Three list prices nobody published. A competitor URL that 404s. USD and EUR mixed on one row. A promo sticker treated as forever list. Feature columns that compare apples to oranges. Two SKUs that are the same plan under different names. A tier someone guessed because the pricing page was vague. That is not mid-price truth. Mid-price is where URL folklore becomes a fake market map — invented prices, stale links, currency/plan mixups, promo-as-list padding, and a pretty sheet pretends the competitor pages agreed with themselves.

I am a freelancer admin helper. I turn messy competitor URL dumps into a clean price-comparison sheet. I am not a CPA, bookkeeper, lawyer, tax advisor, pricing strategist, or competitive-intelligence analyst — and this is not financial, tax, legal, pricing strategy, or competitive-intelligence advice. It is the checklist I run mid-price (and again before anyone treats the sheet as what competitors charge) so the price sheet stays honest while URLs are still arriving.

(If you want the full competitor URLs → price sheet workflow, see my earlier post when it is live. This one is the second-pass checklist so invented list prices, stale competitor URLs, currency/plan mixups, promo-as-list folklore, feature apples-to-oranges, duplicate SKUs, and guessed tiers do not quietly rewrite what the pages actually show.)

What "honest" looks like mid-price

• Every real competitor offer is one row — duplicate SKUs / same plan under two names are merged, not counted twice
• List price exists only when evidenced on the page (or labeled ask / guess / TBD) — invented numbers are folklore, not market data
• Currency and billing period are locked (USD/EUR, monthly/annual) — mixups that look tidy are worse than an honest gap
• Promo / trial / limited offers are labeled promo — not folded into forever list
• Feature columns compare like-for-like — apples-to-oranges cells stay apples / ask, not green checkmarks
• Source URL + capture date exist — stale or 404 links are labeled stale, not still greening the sheet
• Nothing invented beyond what the URL dump supports — guessed tiers are not a competitive map

If the only “price sheet” you have is a green list column and a bookmark folder titled “competitors somehow,” mid-price honesty has already slipped.

The mid-price checklist (run it before / while you clean)

Use this against the dump (competitor URL list, screenshots/exports, sticky notes, old price sheet if any) before you paste everything into a pretty template and call the sheet current.

1. Inventory the competitor URL dump

• [ ] Soft scope is named (this category / these N competitors / this capture window) — out-of-scope noise stays out or flagged
• [ ] Every URL is listed once: source link, capture date, claim type (list / promo / quote / screenshot / unknown), notes
• [ ] Duplicate URLs or same SKU under two names are labeled duplicate — not two list prices for one plan
• [ ] Stale, redirected, or 404 links are labeled stale — not invented into tidy rows from memory
• [ ] Anything clearly superseded by a newer capture of the same page is labeled stay-off-live — do not resurrect as this mid-price list

2. Lock price, currency, plan, and source before you trust the sheet

• [ ] Every row has a list price or is labeled ask / guess / TBD — blank cells that look complete are not evidence
• [ ] Currency and billing period are locked or ask — USD monthly vs EUR annual is not one comparable cell
• [ ] Plan / tier name matches the page or is labeled ask — guessed “Pro-ish” tiers stay guesses
• [ ] Source URL + capture date exist for every price cell — vibes and Slack folklore are not list
• [ ] Skim test: you can answer “who charges what, in which currency/period, from which page, as of when?” without reopening the bookmarks

3. Kill invented-list / promo-as-list / apples-to-oranges inflation

• [ ] Same plan under two phrasings is one row — not two open competitors
• [ ] Promo, trial, and launch stickers are labeled promo — do not invent them as forever list to green the column
• [ ] Feature columns are like-for-like or marked apples / ask — do not pad checkmarks across mismatched plans
• [ ] Currency/plan mixups stay flagged — not silently converted because the sheet looked tidier
• [ ] Screenshot folklore with no live URL is either added once with capture note or labeled out-of-scope — ghost lines are not a map
• [ ] Guessed tiers with no page evidence stay guess / ask — not locked as list

4. Park open asks, tidy-sheet lies, and superseded captures

• [ ] Invented list prices are either evidenced or labeled guess / ask / TBD — not locked because the price column looked empty
• [ ] Open asks (missing currency, unclear plan, stale URL, promo vs list conflict, feature mismatch) sit in one list — not scattered across bookmarks
• [ ] Superseded or walked-back captures are archived once so they do not still look live
• [ ] Anything still incomplete stays incomplete — do not greenwash a mid-price dump into a finished competitive strategy deck

Soft CTA

If you want the competitor URLs cleaned into a price-comparison sheet for you: competitor URLs in, price sheet out in 24 hours — $12 on Gumroad. Code ADMIN12 takes $2 off. Full catalog: shop · GitHub Pages.

Not financial, tax, legal, pricing strategy, or competitive-intelligence advice. I organize the URL dump; you own the pricing decisions and how you use the sheet.