About ProteinPrice.com

ProteinPrice is America's protein price comparison engine. We track 702 products across 64 brands at 12 US retailers, refresh on each update cycle, and rank everything by a transparent Value Score so you can see, at a glance, which protein is actually the best deal right now.

Our mission

Help every American buy protein smarter. No marketing fluff, no editorial bias, no "best of" lists ghost-written by a brand's PR team: just real prices ranked by real value across every retailer we can scrape.

Protein powder is one of the most marketed categories on the internet. Every brand claims to be the best. Every "top 10" list is suspiciously full of the same six SKUs. Sticker prices look cheap until you do the math on protein per serving and servings per tub. We built ProteinPrice because the only honest way to answer "which protein should I buy?" is to compute the answer from live retailer data, in public, on every page.

The mission is narrow on purpose. We do not write nutrition advice, training programs, or workout plans. We do not certify brand claims. We do not run lab assays. We compute one number, every day, in public, for every protein product we track: grams of protein per dollar at the lowest verified retailer price. That number drives every ranking on the site.

Who we serve

The catalog is built for anyone in the US buying protein on a budget that matters to them. In practice, that breaks into a few clear audiences:

• Strength trainees and gym-goers who go through one to three tubs a month and want the per-gram math to actually work out across a year of spending. Saving $4 on a tub is meaningless. Saving $0.02 per gram across 40 tubs is not.
• Recreational lifters and weekend athletes who do not need the cheapest possible powder but want to know they are not being overcharged by a brand that markets harder than it formulates.
• People navigating dietary constraints: lactose intolerance pushing them to plant or whey isolate, vegan dietary patterns pushing them to pea-rice blends, low-sugar goals pushing them toward isolates and zero-carb bars. The catalog surfaces sub-categories so the budget math runs inside the constraint, not outside it.
• Older adults and women trying to hit protein targets through some mix of powders, bars, and ready-to-drinks. The trade-off between powder economics and RTD convenience is real, and the Value Score makes it explicit.
• Cost-conscious households running multiple protein consumers on a shared grocery budget. The retailer comparison and price-history audit at /data/ exist so the family Costco run can be timed against an iHerb sale.
• Journalists, researchers, and analysts who need a clean public price feed for the supplement category. The open JSON at /data/ and the press kit at /press/ are built for them.

What unites every audience here is the same: they want a real answer to "is this product worth it at this price right now?" and they do not trust a brand-funded "best of" list to give them one. ProteinPrice exists to give them the math instead.

What we actually do

Concretely, every day, the site does this:

• Track 702 products across 64 brands: from mainstream names like Optimum Nutrition, Dymatize, MuscleTech, Quest, Ghost, and Myprotein, to specialist brands like Transparent Labs, Naked Nutrition, KOS, Vital Proteins, and Bare Performance Nutrition. The full list lives at /brands/.
• Scrape prices from 12 US retailers on a daily cycle: Walmart, iHerb, GNC, Bodybuilding.com, Target, Vitacost, Muscle & Strength, Amazon, Tiger Fitness, Costco, MyProtein, and Transparent Labs. The retailer roster is published at /retailers/.
• Calculate a transparent Value Score: grams of protein per dollar, normalized to a 0–100 scale. The formula is shown on every product page; full methodology is at /how-it-works/.
• Publish open JSON data feeds: anyone can read our products, retailers, brands, system status, price history, and scope files at /data/. The full API reference is at /api/docs/.
• Show live updater health publicly at . If a retailer tracker is failing, you can see it. No hidden data quality.

How our methodology works

Every product on ProteinPrice has the same scoring engine applied to it. There is no manual ranking, no editorial reshuffle, no "featured deal" override. Here is exactly how the Value Score is computed:

Two products go in, one number comes out. A $30 tub with 20 servings of 20g protein scores (20 × 20) ÷ 30 = 13.3 g/$. A $54.99 tub with 74 servings of 24g protein scores (24 × 74) ÷ 54.99 = 32.3 g/$. The bigger tub is more than twice the value, even though the sticker price is almost twice as high. This is the only number that matters when you're optimizing for grams of protein in your kitchen versus dollars in your bank account.

Why we don't accept paid placement

The whole point of a "best value" site is to be trusted by readers. The moment we sell a #1 spot, we become a billboard, not a catalog. So we don't. No brand has ever paid for ranking, and no brand ever will. Affiliate commissions exist (see How we make money below) but they are paid by retailers on a per-click or per-sale basis and have no effect on which product appears first. Rankings come from the formula, full stop.

Why rankings shift automatically as prices change

Because prices are rechecked on each update cycle and the score is recomputed each run, rankings move as new data arrives. A product that's #4 in the morning may be #1 by afternoon if a retailer drops the price. We don't curate: we publish what the math says. This is also why bookmarking "the best whey" is a losing strategy: the right answer changes weekly. Use the live page.

Multi-retailer consensus and outlier rejection

"Best current price" is not whatever number a single tracker happened to return. It's the lowest verified price after several sanity checks (see Quality controls). If iHerb shows a product at $19.99 while every other retailer shows $54.99, we reject the $19.99 as an outlier rather than promote a glitch to the top of the rankings. If two or more retailers independently agree on a low price, we trust it.

The complete methodology: formula derivations, edge cases, how we handle subscription pricing and bundle deals: lives at /how-it-works/.

Editorial approach

The principles behind every ranking, comparison, and "best value" badge on the site are documented at /editorial-standards/. The short version:

• No paid placement, ever. No brand has bought a ranking on ProteinPrice and none ever will. Affiliate commissions exist but they are paid by retailers on outbound clicks and have zero effect on which product appears first. The Value Score formula does not have a "commission rate" input.
• Affiliate decoration happens after the ranking. The scoring engine ranks first; affiliate parameters get added to outbound URLs second. All retailers are ranked exactly the same way and any of them can win the "Best Price" slot whenever the math says so.
• Mistakes get public corrections. When we get something wrong on a long-form article, recipe, review, or guide, we add a dated correction note rather than silently editing the original copy. The append-only price history at /data/ means we cannot retroactively change what we showed.
• Brand relationships are disclosed. Nobody behind ProteinPrice holds a paid role with any of the 64 brands ranked on the site. If that ever changes, the affected coverage carries a disclosure note.

For the full account of how affiliate links work, how products get added, how reviews are sourced, the corrections policy, and the conflict-of-interest disclosure, see /editorial-standards/.

Testing methodology

"Testing" on ProteinPrice means verification, not lab work. We verify two things every day:

• Prices, by scraping each SKU's canonical product page at each retailer where it is sold. Live retailer scrapes, structured-data parsing where available, sanity-range filtering, swing-rejection, and cross-retailer outlier checks. Full pipeline at /how-we-test/.
• Specs, by reading the brand's supplement facts panel and product page for protein per serving, servings per container, ingredients, and flavour lineup. Reformulations trigger a manual re-verification before the new values go live.

What we deliberately do not test: independent lab assays, banned-substance screening, heavy-metal panels, microbial contamination, taste, texture, or the truthfulness of marketing claims. Other organizations (NSF Certified for Sport, Informed Sport, ConsumerLab) cover that territory and we cite them where their findings are public. The full account of what we test, what we do not test, and how to report inaccuracies lives at /how-we-test/.

Quality controls

Live scraped data is messy. Retailers change page layouts. Bundles get listed as single units. Subscribe-and-save toggles flip. A "From $14.99" lure price is not the same as the actual SKU price. The only way to publish prices people can trust is to enforce strict, automated safeguards on every value we ingest. Here is what runs on every scrape:

• Sanity range $5–$500: Any returned price outside this window is rejected as a parsing error. Protein tubs simply do not retail for $1 or $5,000.
• >50% swing rejection unless 2+ retailers agree: If a product's price moves more than half its prior value in a single cycle, we require corroboration from at least one other retailer before accepting the change. Lone retailer spikes or crashes are suppressed.
• Outlier rejection across retailers: Any single retailer's price that sits more than 30% away from the cross-retailer median is rejected. This catches stale list prices, currency-conversion glitches, and accidental wrong-SKU matches.
• 48-hour stale flag: If the last successful scrape for a retailer is older than 48 hours, that listing is flagged stale and the product is marked inStock: false rather than displayed as a current offer. We would rather show "out of stock" than a price we cannot vouch for.
• Per-retailer last-success timestamps: Every retailer slot on every product carries the exact UTC timestamp of its last verified data. These are visible in our public JSON feeds and on the live .
• Append-only audit trail: Every accepted edit is logged to price_history-YYYY-MM.jsonl in /data/. The file is never rewritten. It is an immutable record of what we published, when. If we ever change a price, you can prove it.
• Test suite: 64 unit and integration tests run before every deploy, including regression checks on the scoring engine, the system parsers, the outlier filter, and the stale-flag logic. Code that fails the suite never ships.

How we make money (transparent)

ProteinPrice is free to read, free to use, and free to query via the public API. We pay for the servers, the scraping infrastructure, and the time to maintain it through retailer affiliate commissions:

• Affiliate commissions when you click "View Deal" and buy at the retailer. The commission is paid by the retailer to us, not added to your price. Your cost at checkout is identical whether you arrived via ProteinPrice, Google, or typing the retailer's URL directly.
• How affiliate participation works: When a reader clicks a "View Deal" link and purchases at the destination retailer, ProteinPrice.com may earn a commission. The full per-retailer breakdown lives on /affiliate-disclosure/.
• Commission has zero effect on rankings. The Value Score formula does not know, and cannot know, which retailer pays us what. Rankings are recomputed each update cycle from scraped prices alone. The cheapest verified retailer wins the top slot every time.
• We do not accept payment for editorial placement, sponsored ranking slots, or brand boosts. Ever. No brand has ever paid us for a "best of" mention and none ever will.

For the full plain-English breakdown of our affiliate relationships: what we earn, how it works, what we will and won't do: see /affiliate-disclosure/.

Independent of brands

ProteinPrice is structurally and editorially independent of every protein brand we cover:

• Not owned by any brand. We are not a brand-affiliated property. We are not a "media arm" of a supplement company. We are not a holding-company subsidiary.
• Not employed by any brand. Nobody behind the site is on a brand payroll, retainer, or consulting agreement with any of the 64 brands we rank.
• Editorial perspective fully independent. When we publish a guide or comparison, the conclusions follow the data. If a brand we like is overpriced this month, we say so. If a brand we've never heard of suddenly has the best Value Score, they go to #1 on the page automatically.

Where our data comes from

Honest data quality requires honest data sources. Here are ours, in order of how much volume they contribute:

• Live scraping (checked daily): the primary source. Our trackers visit each retailer's product detail pages and search results, parse the structured price and availability data, and write the results into the catalog. The trackers are open about themselves in User-Agent headers and respect robots.txt.
• Brand official websites: for SKU details that don't change with price (protein per serving, servings per container, ingredient highlights, flavor lineups). We re-verify these whenever a brand reformulates or relaunches a product.
• Retailer search APIs and product detail pages (PDPs): where retailers publish structured product feeds (schema.org Product markup, JSON-LD), we read those preferentially over visual scraping because they're more accurate and less likely to break.
• Manual verification for new SKUs: when a new product enters our scope, a human verifies the protein content, serving count, and retailer URLs by hand before automated scraping begins. We don't add what we haven't seen.
• Future: Amazon PA-API, Walmart Open API: applications are in progress for both. When approved, these will replace the HTML trackers for those retailers, which improves both reliability and our compliance posture.

What we are NOT

Just as important as what we do is what we don't. We deliberately stay in one lane:

• Not a nutritional advice site. We track prices and protein content. We do not tell you how much protein to eat, what your macros should be, or whether a particular product is right for your goals. Talk to a registered dietitian.
• Not a medical or fitness coaching service. Nothing on ProteinPrice is medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. We're a price comparison platform, not a clinic.
• Not an inventory or in-stock guarantee. Prices change between scrapes. Retailers run out of stock, change SKUs, and rotate inventory. Always confirm the current price and availability on the retailer's page before purchasing.
• Not a retailer. We don't sell anything. We don't hold inventory. We don't take payments. We don't ship product. Every purchase happens on the retailer's site, under their terms.

Common questions about ProteinPrice

Contact us

If you spot a price error, a missing product, an outdated brand fact, or a retailer we should add, please tell us. We read every email. Different inboxes route different topics, so the right address speeds up the reply:

For data quality issues, please include the product URL or slug so we can investigate quickly. The append-only price history at /data/ lets us reconstruct exactly what we showed and when, so corrections are usually fast. For editorial complaints, our editorial standards spell out exactly what is in and out of bounds.

ProteinPrice is an independent online publication. We do not operate a physical retail store, a call center, or a customer-service line for retailer orders. If your question is about a purchase you made at Amazon, iHerb, GNC, or any other retailer we link to, the retailer is the right contact: we cannot see your order, modify it, refund it, or ship a replacement.