What LabFare is, and what it isn’t

LabFare compares the price of the same diagnostic blood test across 7 labs in Bangalore. The identical test on the identical sample can differ by three times between labs, and nobody has the hour it takes to check six lab websites by hand.

Where the prices come from

Every price is read directly from the lab’s own website or partner API — never from another comparison site, which would inherit their staleness and their mistakes. The raw response is stored exactly as received, so when we find a parsing bug we can re-parse the stored copy rather than re-scraping the lab.

The pipeline runs nightly. Prices were last refreshed 3d ago. Every price on the site carries the time it was last verified, and a price we have not re-checked recently is ranked below fresher ones even when it is cheaper.

When a price looks wrong

A price that moves more than 30%, or a batch where too many move at once, is held back for a human to look at before it goes live. Most sudden jumps turn out to be our bug rather than the lab’s new price. Where a test name cannot be matched to a canonical test with confidence, the row is excluded and logged rather than guessed at — a missing price is recoverable on the next run, a wrong one is not.

How we check ourselves

We spot-check randomly sampled prices by hand against the labs’ live sites and publish the result. That audit has not been run yet, so there is no accuracy figure to quote — we would rather say so than print a flattering one.

What we don’t do

We do not collect samples, store your reports, handle payments, or give medical advice. There is no account. The only thing we know about you is which test names you searched, and your cart lives in the page URL rather than on a server.