About the desk

Reference Plate is a measurement desk. It exists because consumer health products quote numbers — calories, sleep stages, steps, body fat — and almost nobody checks those numbers against anything. The checking is not difficult. It is just tedious, and it requires buying the products and owning a reference instrument, which is why so little of it gets done.

So we do the tedious version. We buy the product at retail. We measure the same thing with an instrument whose accuracy we can state. We publish the difference between the two, with the sample size, the date, and an id you can quote back at us.

What we are not

We are not a review site in the usual sense. We do not do lifestyle writing, we do not run first impressions, and we do not publish photographs — not of food, not of gear, not of ourselves. A stock photograph on a page about measurement is the one image on it nobody measured, and it would be the least honest thing here.

We also do not rank things we have not measured. If a product is in a category we test but was not in the run, it is absent from the table rather than estimated into it.

How this is paid for

• No affiliate accounts with anyone we cover. None. Not with the app stores, not with the hardware makers, not through an intermediary network. There is no link on this site that pays us if you click it.
• No advertising and no sponsored placement. Nothing on this site can be bought, including a mention.
• No review units. Every product measured here was bought at retail with the desk's own money, at the price anyone else pays. Subscriptions are paid for and cancelled like anyone else's.
• No pre-publication access. No company sees a run, a figure or a verdict before it is public. We will answer a factual query after publication, and the answer goes in the log if it changes anything.
• Running costs come out of the operators' pockets. The rigs were bought once and get amortised over years; the recurring cost is subscriptions and consumables. It is a small operation and it is meant to stay small.

If any of that changes — if we ever take money from a source that could be read as a conflict — it gets written on this page with the date it started, and it gets an entry in the corrections log. A funding change that is not disclosed is the failure this section exists to prevent.

Conflicts

Each analyst publishes their own conflicts statement on their page. Nobody on the desk holds a position in, consults for, or takes work from a company whose products we measure. Where a past engagement exists, it is dated on the analyst's page rather than described as "historic".

When we publish

When a run finishes. That means the site goes quiet for weeks and then produces several pages at once, because a run produces several pages at once. There is no weekly slot and no monthly quota, and we would rather look inactive than pad a schedule.