Press & media kit
TrueTotal is the honest true-cost comparison engine: it shows the whole-life true total of a purchase — the advertised price plus every disclosed hidden cost, minus resale — instead of the sticker alone. This page is a genuine, citable resource for journalists and writers. Everything here is factual; we have deliberately left out anything we cannot stand behind.
The whole cost, not the sticker
TrueTotal is a comparison engine for anything you buy — from a car hire to a cruise to a property — that ranks options by their genuine whole-life cost rather than the advertised price. The core idea is a single, checkable identity: advertised price + every disclosed hidden cost − resale value = the true total.
The advertised sticker leaves out the costs that are actually unavoidable — taxes, fees, fuel, insurance, gratuities, transfers and the rest — and ignores what an item is worth again later. TrueTotal puts those back in, on a like-for-like basis, so two options can be compared on what they really cost, not on which one advertises the smaller number.
It is free to use. Every figure it shows is sourced, dated and confidence-graded, and the exact method is published so anyone can check the maths. TrueTotal is an independent information and comparison service — it does not sell any of the products it lists.
The cheapest sticker is often the dearest
Consumers are trained to compare on advertised prices — the number in the ad, the headline nightly rate, the daily hire rate. But those numbers routinely omit costs that are not optional, which means the lowest sticker can quietly be the most expensive choice once everything unavoidable is added in. The comparison people are shown is not the comparison they need.
The newsworthy idea is simple: make the true total comparable. When the whole-life cost is put on the same footing for every option, the honest ranking can differ sharply from the sticker ranking — and that difference is the story, in category after category.
For a data angle, journalists are welcome to look at our live Hidden-Fee Index, which estimates how much hidden fees add on top of the advertised price by category. The figures there are computed transparently from TrueTotal's category models and are labelled as such — they are illustrative, methodology-driven estimates, not authoritative national statistics, and should be cited that way. The method behind them is on our methodology page.
The facts, and only the facts
Everything below is true and checkable. We have left out numbers we cannot stand behind — there is no user count, funding figure or award here, because none would be honest.
Getting the reference right
Please refer to us as TrueTotal (one word) and link to truetotalcalculator.com. Where you cite a specific figure, please link to the exact page it appears on and note the date it was accessed — our figures are dated and can change as sources update.
For a claim drawn from the Hidden-Fee Index, please make clear the figure is a TrueTotal methodology-based estimate rather than an official statistic.
Name, line and colour
Talk to a person
For interviews, background, fact-checks or a comment, email us. There is a real person at the other end — not a form — and press enquiries are answered directly.
Angles, not claims
These are topics we are glad to help you report — with our method, our data and honest caveats. They are offers of help, not assertions of fact.
A press page that invents credibility is the opposite of what TrueTotal stands for. So there is no logo wall, no fabricated statistic, no award, no testimonial and no company or founder detail we cannot yet stand behind. If you need a fact that isn't here, ask us and we will give you the honest answer.