About UnitCheck

What UnitCheck is

UnitCheck is a unit-price comparison engine. We surface the true cost per unit of consumer products so you can buy intelligently.

Launch vertical is protein powder. We rank it by $/g protein — a metric no other price site calculates, and the one that actually matters if you care about protein cost.

The vision scales: more categories (vitamins, snacks, diapers, printer ink), more retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, Newegg), and eventually a data API for other publishers to cite our numbers.

Why this exists

Big-box retailers don't show you $/g protein. They show you price-per-pound or price-per-serving, which obscures what you're actually buying. Price comparison sites optimize for clicks, not math.

UnitCheck exists to publish unit prices that retailers don't bother showing — $/g protein, $/serving, $/g powder — and document exactly how they're calculated. No black-box AI. No secret ranking algorithm. No paid placement. Just the formula, in plain sight.

When you see a ranking on this site, you can read /methodology and reproduce the math yourself.

How we make money

Affiliate commissions. When you click an outbound link to Amazon and buy something, Amazon pays UnitCheck a small percentage (typically 1–6%, depending on category). This does not change the price you pay.

Crucially: affiliate commissions do NOT influence rankings. Rankings are formula-driven and documented. A product doesn't rank higher because it has a higher commission rate. That would be a conflict of interest and a brand killer. We don't do it.

What UnitCheck doesn't do

No email capture popups. No newsletter signup modals. You won't see an exit-intent overlay asking for your email.

No display ads. Affiliate revenue is the business model. No banner ads, no sponsored placements, no "native ads" pretending to be content.

No dark patterns. No countdown timers. No "only 3 left in stock" scarcity tactics borrowed from Amazon's UI. No fake reviews or review manipulation.

No user accounts. Anonymous access only. Every account is a support burden and a security risk. You don't need an account to compare prices.

No data selling. We don't track you across sites. We don't sell your data to data brokers. We don't sell "audience insights" to brands. We collect minimal analytics (which pages you visit, not who you are) to understand which categories deserve more development work.

No cookies for tracking. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which doesn't require a consent banner and respects privacy by design.

Who runs it

Built and operated by Nathen McVittie out of Los Angeles. Solo bootstrap project. No VC funding, no advertising deals, no corporate overlords.

You can reach the operator directly at [email protected]. Feedback, bug reports, and corrections go to the same inbox.

What's next

More categories: Vitamins, snacks, household consumables, diapers, printer ink, motor oil, pet food. One category at a time, only when methodology is clean and sourcing is reliable.

More retailers: Walmart, Best Buy, Newegg, Costco. Amazon is the launch partner; others follow when APIs and affiliate programs are ready.

Image-based extraction: Today we parse nutrition data from Amazon's text fields. Phase 2: extract from product images using OCR and computer vision, so we can rank products even when the manufacturer doesn't provide structured data.

Price history charts: 30/90/180 day price trends, so you can see if "today's price" is actually low or if it's been cheaper recently.

All updates are documented in /changelog.