How we measure delivery

Every delivery figure on this panel comes from the supplier behind that service. We do not time orders ourselves, and we do not estimate. This page explains exactly what each number is, how old it is allowed to be, and what we do when a supplier publishes nothing at all.

The two figures a supplier can publish

Suppliers report one of two different things, never both, and the two are not interchangeable:

A measured completion time. How long orders on that service have actually been taking, drawn from the supplier's own statistics. It appears as “1 hour 59 minutes”.
A live delivery rate. Throughput instead of a duration — “4,266 per hour”, “268 per minute”.

We print whichever one we receive, exactly as it stands. We never convert a rate into a completion time. Dividing a quantity by a rate would produce a duration that looks measured but is arithmetic of ours dressed up as a measurement of theirs, and it would be wrong the moment the supplier's queue changed.

How old a number is allowed to be

The service feed is rebuilt every four minutes, with a full rebuild twice an hour. A figure older than six hours is not printed at all. If a supplier's feed stops, the column empties and says so rather than showing last night's speed as if it were this morning's.

What an empty field means

Where a supplier publishes no measurement, the field stays blank and the row reads Waiting for data. That label is not a measurement and never appears inside a sentence as though it were one. An empty field is the honest state of that service, not an omission we are going to fill in with a plausible-looking guess.

Drop rate

The drop badge next to a service is the supplier's own historical figure for that service — the share that falls off after delivery. It is published where the supplier reports it and left off where they do not. It is their number, not our opinion of their number, which is why some services show a wide range rather than a flattering one.

Refill terms

Where a service carries a refill guarantee, the term is written into the service name itself, so it is visible on the price list before you order rather than buried in terms afterwards. Services without a guarantee say so in the same place.

What the colours mean

The colour on a delivery figure is a claim, so we only paint one where there is something to claim:

Green with a flame — the supplier is currently sending more than 1,000 units an hour, or finishing in under half an hour.
Red — slower than that.
No colour — we hold no measurement for that service.

Rules we hold ourselves to

A number we did not receive is not printed.
A number we received is printed in the unit it arrived in.
A stale number is dropped, not aged forward.
A missing number is shown as missing, not substituted from a similar service.
The service ID shown on the page is the same ID the API accepts, so what you read is what you send.

Check it yourself

None of this has to be taken on trust. The live price list carries the figure for every service we sell, the fastest services page ranks them by measured time, and the monthly data archive freezes a snapshot of the catalogue at the end of each month so past figures stay checkable after the live ones have moved on.