Hi PH Official inflation stats do something most people don't realize: when a price rises, the basket changes. Steak gets expensive, the model assumes you switch to chicken, and the measured increase shrinks. That's defensible economics — it's also not the question most people are asking, which is "what does the life I actually had cost now?" So I built the stubborn version. The Fixed Basket prices one unchanging cart of 17 everyday categories — rent, groceries, gas, healthcare, tuition — every month since January 2000, and never substitutes anything for anything. Zero BLS CPI series. Not as a source, not as a bridge, not as a fallback. Every number traces to a primary publisher: BLS, EIA, Census, CMS, KFF, Zillow. Apparel is literally four physical goods — a pair of Levi's 501s, Chuck Taylors, Dr. Martens 1460s, Dickies 874s — priced from catalogs and archived retailer pages. The result: 3.55%/yr since 2000. A 2000 dollar buys about 41¢ of that cart today. What I'd actually like feedback on: the site publishes its own gaps. There's a coverage timeline showing exactly where each category's data starts and stops, a substitution log explaining every change ever made, and plain-language notes on the weak spots — the drug basket can't see medicines invented after 2000, medical prices use Medicare rates (a floor, not what private insurers pay), and rent is national-only. Nothing is interpolated to fill a hole. It's free, no account, and there's an open JSON API. Would genuinely rather hear where the methodology is wrong than that the design is nice.

Fixed Basket

An inflation index that never swaps steak for chicken

An inflation index that never swaps steak for chicken