How this site makes money

Why we're telling you this

PlateCost runs on public data. We think you should know how the site plans to pay for itself, even before any money comes in. Right now, none does. This page will stay current as that changes.

The plan

We expect two revenue sources down the road:

• Restaurant supply affiliate partnerships. If you click a link to a supplier and buy something, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
• Display ads. Standard ad placements, sold through an ad network, the kind you see on most sites.

Neither is live yet. As of today:

• No affiliate partner is signed.
• The affiliate slots you might see on data pages are empty placeholders. They mark where a link could go later. They don't link anywhere yet, and nobody is paying us for that space.
• No display ads are running.

We're building this in the open. When a partnership goes live, we'll update this page.

What money never touches

The prices on this site come from USDA AMS Market News reports, pulled through their MARS API. That includes the national shell egg report, the CME cash dairy weekly recap for butter, cheese, nonfat dry milk, and dry whey, and the Northeast fluid cream report.

Those numbers get published as reported. We don't adjust them, round them in a supplier's favor, or swap in a different source because an advertiser asks. A future affiliate partner has no say in what number appears on a data page. If that ever changed, it would break the entire reason this site exists.

Why this matters for a kitchen buyer

You're probably here to check a wholesale price before you call a supplier or lock in a menu cost. That only works if the number is honest. Affiliate money and ad money are ways to keep the lights on. They are not ways to move a price.

What "public data" means here

USDA Market News data is public information, funded by taxpayers and released for exactly this kind of use. We're not claiming it as proprietary. Every data page on this site names the specific USDA report it pulled from and the date we retrieved it, so you can go check the original source yourself. Nothing here should ever ask you to trust us instead of USDA. We're a pipeline, not the origin.

What we ask of ourselves

• Keep affiliate and ad content clearly separated from price data.
• Never let a partner pick which USDA report we cite or how we display it.
• Update this page the day any partnership actually starts, not after.
• Keep the about page and this one consistent with each other.

Questions

If something on this site looks off, or a disclosure seems out of date, that's worth telling us. This is a small operation and pages like this one are meant to hold us to something specific, not just sound responsible.