Data Sources

This is a complete, unfiltered list of every source registered in our system, including
retired or inactive ones. We’d rather show you an honest, evolving list than a
polished one that hides how new this project is. Nothing here is a merchant relationship
or a paid placement; a source appears because we use its data, full stop.

How we rank sources

Not every source deserves equal trust, and treating them as equal is how sites end up
quoting a forum comment with the same confidence as a government tax authority. We rank
every source on a six-level authority scale before deciding what it’s allowed to
support on the site:

1. UAE government and regulators, for tax, customs and legal claims.
2. Recognized industry benchmarks, such as the Dubai Gold & Jewellery Group.
3. Official retailer sources, for facts specific to that retailer only.
4. Reputable financial and news organizations.
5. Specialist secondary sources, useful, but not authoritative on their own.
6. Community and social discussion, used only to discover questions worth researching,
   never as the sole support for a factual, tax or pricing claim.

A level-5 or level-6 source can tell us what people are asking or hint at a hypothesis
worth checking, but it never gets to be the only evidence behind a number we publish as
fact. If you look at the list below and see a source at level 5, that’s us being
honest about its limits, not an oversight.

What “active” and “inactive” mean

An active source is currently feeding live data into the site. An inactive source is kept
in the registry for transparency and audit purposes, including, for example, the
placeholder we used before any real data source existed, but nothing on the site is
currently computed from it. We don’t delete retired sources from this list; a
disappearing row would be harder to notice than an “inactive” badge.

How a source gets added or removed

Before we start using a new source, we check what it actually publishes, how it publishes
it, and what its own documentation (if any) claims about update frequency and reliability.
A source enters our registry with an authority level assigned up front, and that level
doesn’t just get quietly upgraded later because the source turns out to be
convenient, a level-5 interim feed stays labelled as one until it’s genuinely
replaced by something more authoritative, not until we get used to it.

A source gets marked inactive, not deleted, the moment it stops being used, whether
because it failed repeatedly, because we replaced it with something better, or because its
data no longer matched what we needed. We think a visible history of “here’s
what we used to rely on and why we stopped” is more useful to a skeptical reader than
a list that only ever shows the current, flattering state.

What’s next

The gold-price feed currently active is a stopgap, an unlicensed, undocumented endpoint
with no service agreement, chosen because it lets us build and demonstrate the full
ingestion, validation and fallback system honestly rather than leaving that machinery
untested. We intend to replace it with a contracted metals-price provider, and this page
will update the moment that happens, the source name and status here will change, and the
old entry will move to inactive rather than disappear. Regulatory and tax sources (the UAE
Federal Tax Authority, for VAT and customs claims) are cited directly on the guide pages
that reference them rather than routed through this registry, since they aren’t live
data feeds.

Why we publish this list at all

Most sites don’t show you where their numbers come from, and most readers never think
to ask. We think that’s backwards for anything involving money. A source list you
can inspect is what turns “trust us” into something you can actually verify, and it keeps us honest too, since a source that’s clearly labeled as an interim
stopgap is much harder to quietly leave in place forever.

See methodology for how these feed into the rates shown across
the site, and our editorial policy for how non-pricing
sources (tax, customs, regulatory) are chosen and verified.