How we check prices
Every price on ptakaro comes from a named shop or brand. A shop price carries the time we checked it and is compared only with like-for-like offers; a brand's launch price shows the day it was announced. This page explains each rule.
Where prices come from
We take prices from shops' own websites and from brands' own price announcements, and from a shop's price feed or catalogue when the shop gives us one. Each shop price on a page names its shop, and the methodology box on each phone page lists the source behind every shop. A launch price is the price a brand announced: it names who announced it and on which day, links to the announcement, and is never a shop price or the “from” price.
The shop prices on ptakaro today come from 16 shops: 8 retailers, 5 brands' own online stores, 2 marketplaces and an authorised distributor.
Our crawler, PtaKaroBot, reads public pages of the websites on our source list, such as a brand's spec pages or a shop's product pages. We do not copy other comparison sites.
- It names itself in every request and follows each website's robots.txt.
- It sends one request at a time to a website, at least 3 seconds apart, or further apart if robots.txt asks.
- It retries a failed request at most twice, and when a website answers 429 or 503 it waits as long as the website's Retry-After asks, up to 60 seconds.
- When a website refuses it, answers it with a bot check, or keeps answering 429 or 503, no crawl job on our crawl server asks that website again until the next night's crawl starts, at 02:30 Pakistan time; a longer Retry-After is honoured until the time it gave.
- It never works around a refusal, a bot check or a rate limit.
How a website owner can limit or block it is on the PtaKaroBot page.
How a price is read
Our checks read the price exactly as the shop or brand prints it, using fixed rules written for each website, never an AI guess. We keep a copy of what we read so a person can verify it later, and code checks that every number we publish can be found in that text. Each check is stored as a new record; an old check is never overwritten.
How fresh a price is
- A price checked in the last 72 hours shows a green dot: “checked 3 hours ago”.
- Up to 7 days old, it still counts, with a grey dot.
- After 7 days without a new check, it is marked “Not confirmed since” the date, drops out of the “from” price and is left out of the price information we give search engines.
Like for like
The “from” price is the lowest price for a new, PTA-approved unit confirmed in the last 7 days. For products where PTA registration does not apply, it is the lowest price for a new unit. Non-PTA offers, offers whose PTA status is not stated, and used and refurbished offers are listed in their own groups and never mixed into it. When a non-PTA unit is cheaper, the page says so on a separate, labelled line. When no new, PTA-approved unit can be bought, the page says so and names the unit it shows instead, such as “Used, PTA-approved” or “Non-PTA”.
When a shop says an offer is out of stock, the offer stays on the page, marked “Out of stock”, but it does not count toward the “from” price, the price history, price alerts or the price information we give search engines. If every offer is out of stock, the page says so, with the last price and the date we checked it. When a shop does not say whether it has stock, its price still counts and is shown as “Stock not confirmed”.
Offers are sorted by price, lowest first, with out-of-stock offers after the ones you can buy. Paid links never move an offer up; see paid links and disclosures.
Big moves wait for a person
When a shop's price moves more than 20% from the last price we confirmed, the new price is held until a person has checked it. A new listing is matched to a model and version automatically only when its title names the brand and the model and leaves no doubt about the version: the memory sizes in it fit only one version, or the model comes in one version only. Anything less certain waits for a person too.
Price history
The chart shows one point per version per day: the lowest like-for-like price that day across the shops we check. It changes only on days when that lowest price changed. A shop's price stops counting 7 days after its last check.
Specs
Specs come from the brand's own pages. Some are read from saved copies of those pages at the Internet Archive (web.archive.org). Each value keeps its source and a date, shown as a numbered note on the spec table: the date we read the page, or, for a saved copy at the Internet Archive, the date the Archive saved it, not the date we read the copy. Values reported before the brand confirms them are labelled “rumoured”. Anything we have not confirmed is listed as not confirmed, never filled in.
PTA tax
Our PTA tax figures for the passport and CNIC routes are estimates from a duty table we read from the official documents. Each value is stored with the document it comes from and the date we checked it, and the table says whether it has been verified against the official document. A slab without an official value says “no official value yet”. The official amount is always set when you register through DIRBS, so our figure is an estimate. See the PTA tax calculator.
Rivals and lists
- “Rivals at a similar price” are other models whose lowest confirmed price is within 15% of this one (25% when fewer than three match), closest first. They are never paid for.
- Price-range and feature pages list models by the rule printed on each page, such as “refresh rate of 120Hz or more”. A page is made only when at least 3 models qualify, with one exception: a price-range page is published while it lists at least one phone (even an out-of-stock one), for up to 14 days after a day on which at least 3 phones had a price in its range, unless the last version of the site we published did not have that page. On such a past day a phone counts only at its price that day in our daily price history, or, if by the end of that day no shop had checked it since a check that found a new, PTA-approved unit you could buy, at that check’s price until the end of the day 14 days after it. A check that found it out of stock never counts. This is so that a small price move does not take a page away overnight.
- Best lists are picked by a named editor; see our editorial policy.
When we get it wrong
Use “Report a wrong price” on any phone page; a person checks every report. Our goal is to fix a confirmed mistake within 48 hours. See corrections.
Sources behind the current pages
Infinix Kenya (ke.infinixmobility.com) Infinix Pakistan (pk.infinixmobility.com) itel (www.itel-life.com) itel Pakistan (itel-pk.com) realme Pakistan (realme.com/pk) Samsung Pakistan (samsung.com/pk) TECNO Mobile (tecno-mobile.com) TECNO Mobile Pakistan (tecno-mobile.com/pak) XPark Pakistan (pk.xpark.com)