Honest data3 min read
Why we publish our limitations
Our coverage page lists more programs we cannot search than programs we can, and says which lock is shut on each. Here is why the barrier column exists — and what it cost us to get honest about it.
Visit our programs page and you will find something coverage pages do not usually contain: entries whose headline is that they do not work. Five programs are listed; none is cleared for sale; exactly one can fetch live availability at all. Publishing that took an argument, because every instinct in product marketing says a coverage page is a place to look strong. We publish it because a coverage claim is a number like any other on this site, and numbers here carry their provenance.
Two independent locks
The page’s central idea is that “why can’t I search this program?” has two different answers that must never blur. A commercial barrier means we can technically fetch the data and hold no permission to sell it. A technical barrier means the program refuses automated access, and no permission of ours changes that. Some programs are behind both locks; some we simply have not started, and the entry exists only so the roadmap is legible. Each entry names its lock, because the locks have different keys and different keyholders.
The correction that taught us the rule
The barrier column exists because we got this wrong in public. Our Qantas page once described the integration as documented, tested and waiting on our own permission paperwork — which was true as far as it went, and left exactly the wrong impression: that a signature would switch it on. It would not. Qantas refuses automated clients regardless of any approval we hold. Permission and access are independent locks, only one of them was ever ours to open, and the flattering half-truth stayed up until we noticed what it implied. We corrected the page itself rather than quietly editing history — its entry now records the correction in its own text.
A coverage page that lists only what works is an advertisement. Ours is a record, and the record includes the locks.
Sentences that cannot drift
The coverage summary on our home page — how many programs are integrated, how many can fetch, how many are blocked and by what — is not copywriting. It is generated from the same table that renders the programs page, so the marketing sentence and the detail pages cannot disagree; when the table changes, every sentence built on it changes in the same deploy. A claim that is typed twice will eventually be true once.
The list every program carries
Each program entry ends with a section called “what we cannot tell you”, and it is never empty — not even for the program that works. Whether a seat survives until checkout, whether a partner’s own tool shows different space, whether you personally are eligible: these are unknowable from where we stand, and a gap the reader cannot see is indistinguishable from a lie. Publishing limitations is not modesty. It is the only way a small product earns the right to be believed about the things it does claim — the day we say a program is live, we want that sentence to land on a page that has never once rounded up.