Editorial Policy and Verification Standard
This page describes how we decide what to publish. It is written in specifics rather than principles, because a standard nobody can check is not a standard.
1. Primary Sources Only
If a company said it, we quote it and link to the page it appears on. If we cannot reproduce a claim from the source ourselves, we do not publish it as fact.
That rule has teeth. We have discarded items because a quoted phrase could not be found on the page it was attributed to, and we have declined to publish a widely repeated figure because its only trace was other people repeating it.
Second-hand claims are attributed to whoever made them, never adopted as our own.
2. Every Figure Carries a Date
Prices, mintages, merchant counts, lease rates and availability all move. A number without a date is not information.
So every statistic on this site states either when the source published it, or when we observed it — and we distinguish between the two, because they are not the same thing.
This matters more here than in most subjects. Goldback pricing tracks the gold price and has moved close to 4% inside a single week. A company we cover keeps years-old announcements permanently online with no indication they are superseded, so a figure that looks current can be a year stale.
3. Conflicts Are Reported, Never Resolved
When two official pages disagree, we show you both and say which page each came from. We do not pick the one that reads better, and we do not average them.
A live example: a dealer's main lease terms state one early-release fee while its own FAQ, on the same page, states a range. We publish both, note the contradiction, and tell you to confirm the figure that applies to your own agreement. That is more useful than a confident single number that might be wrong.
Where a disputed figure appears more than once on this site, the caveat appears with it every time — not just in the section explaining the dispute.
4. We Say When We Do Not Know
Unpublished mintages, unannounced release dates, undefined policy terms and unclear eligibility are all stated plainly as unknown.
"No mintage figure has been published" is a more honest sentence than an estimate, and a more useful one, because it tells you that anybody quoting a number is guessing.
Language We Do Not Use
- No guaranteed-return language. Precious metals carry no guaranteed return, and metal-paid lease income is contractual, not certain.
- No invented appreciation figures. We do not publish "past performance" for collectibles without verified completed sales.
- No stock states as fact. Inventory is not knowable from outside, so we write "available while stock lasts" rather than asserting a level.
- No legal-tender claims. Goldbacks are not legal tender under 31 U.S.C. § 5103, and no US state has issued a Goldback-specific ruling. Acceptance is voluntary everywhere.
- No scam framing without a cited public record. Criticism is specific and sourced, or it is not published.
How Our Tools Are Built
Our calculators take your figures. There are no pre-filled "expected" returns, no default growth rates and no hard-coded metal prices, because those are assumptions dressed up as data.
We also do not duplicate tools the companies themselves provide. Our calculators do purchase analysis — premium over melt, premium over official exchange value, total outlay, break-even resale — which is the question a buyer actually has and nobody else answers.
Images
Every diagram on this site is drawn by us. We do not use product photography we do not own, and we do not reproduce Goldback's artwork or any government seal. Data graphics carry the date their figures were captured.
Corrections
We get things wrong. When we do, we correct them visibly rather than quietly — see the corrections policy. If you have found an error, please tell us.