How to trust your BOM pricing data

A sourcing tool is a data product. If a single number in it is invented, everything built on top — quotes, budgets, purchase orders — inherits the error, and nobody finds out until the parts arrive or the margin disappears.

This is the rule we work to: every price and stock figure comes from a distributor, or it is not shown.

Prices are never generated

AI is used for part metadata, alternates and reading published distributor pages — never to estimate a price. There is no model guessing what a resistor probably costs.

When a distributor's published page is read rather than supplied through an API, the extracted values are checked for sanity, and an implausible price ladder is rejected instead of shown.

Official distributor APIs wherever a feed exists

Published distributor pages read as a grounded fallback

No estimated, averaged or modelled prices anywhere

Fresh, not cached-forever

Results are cached briefly so repeated lookups inside a working session are instant, and re-priced after that window. Caches are partitioned by region, so an EU price never leaks into a US run.

Exact part matching

A wrong match is worse than no match. We accept exact MPNs and genuine variants, and reject unrelated category or search-page results. A distributor that returns a placeholder with no stock, no price and no manufacturer is dropped rather than shown as an empty quote.

Honest empty states

If regional sources have nothing, the search widens worldwide. If that also finds nothing, the line says so and gives a verified distributor link to check, with the option to retry unresolved parts. You always know the difference between 'no stock' and 'we did not look'.

Evidence you can hand over

Every exported line carries its distributor, source type, quantity break, MOQ, lead time and stock, so a colleague, customer or auditor can retrace the number instead of taking it on trust.

Does AI set any prices?

No. AI handles part metadata, alternates and reading published distributor pages. Prices and stock always originate from a distributor.

How current is the data?

Fetched live per run, with a short cache for repeated lookups in the same session and region.

What if a distributor returns nothing?

The sweep widens worldwide, and any line still unresolved shows a verified link and can be retried — never a placeholder price.