Methodology
How our market benchmarks work
Pricing in live events is a black box — everybody guesses, nobody publishes. We're fixing that with an honest benchmark. The first question anyone smart asks is "how do I know this number is right?" Here's exactly where our numbers come from, and how we keep them trustworthy.
Where the data comes from
📑 Public records
Awarded public contracts, published rental-house rate cards, and public union wage scales. Verifiable, cited, and free of response bias — an awarded contract is what actually got paid, not a number someone shaded for a survey.
🤝 Contributed with consent
Rates that producers and vendors share through the platform, always with their okay. They go in to get the market picture back. Nobody is enrolled without consent, and anyone can opt out.
🏢 Data partnerships
Organizations that already hold real, structured pricing data contribute it under agreement, in exchange for the enriched benchmark. Their individual numbers are never exposed — only the aggregate.
How we keep it honest
We suppress thin data
We never publish a number built from too few independent sources. Below our floor, you see “contribute to unlock,” not a guess dressed up as a market rate.
We label what’s early
A bucket that’s still light is marked directional — a signal, not a verdict. It only graduates to a verified market rate once enough independent sources back it.
We show ranges, not single quotes
You get a median and a typical range (25th–75th percentile), never one company’s individual price and never the extreme high or low. The spread is the honest part of the answer.
We lean on bias-resistant sources
Cold price surveys skew low — the cheapest, hungriest shops answer; the big ones don’t. We anchor on public records and real transactions, which don’t have that response bias.
What we don't claim
We don't pretend to know every price in the industry — nobody does, and anyone who says so is guessing. Our benchmark is solid in the lanes where enough independent data exists, directional in the rest, and it compounds as more comes in. We'd rather show you a small honest number with its sample size attached than a confident wrong one.
Questions about our data? admin@wavemist.io · See also our security & privacy page.