R6 — Flag the vendor incentive on every cost claim — AWS price-cut count, SaaS build-vs-buy ranges, agency portal estimates

Rule: Every cost-floor or cost-ceiling claim cited in a Candid article or client deck gets an explicit source label and, where the source has a commercial stake, an explicit vendor-incentive flag.

Why: The dominant sources on both ends of this brief have incentives. AWS markets "we cut prices N times" (AWS "we've cut prices 100+ times since 2006" framing — quarantined as vendor self-congratulation) because it sells cloud. SPP, Agency Handy, Kavara market portal cost ranges (SPP (2025): custom client portal $20k–$50k initial development + $10k–$25k/yr maintenance; Agency Handy $25k–$60k all-in over 6–12 months, Custom dashboards/analytics apps: $80,000–$250,000 depending on real-time/data-source complexity (Kavara)) because they sell alternatives. Honest editorial discipline names the source and the incentive — and lets the reader weigh it.

How to apply:

• Every published figure carries source attribution inline, not just in a footnote.
• Vendor framing is named when used — "AWS's own retrospective" rather than "industry consensus."
• The dated primary figures (launch price, current published price) are preferred over vendor retrospectives.
• See Caveats: AWS vendor framing quarantined; build-vs-buy vendor cost pages flagged; DrPeering single-source; sysadmin wages needs-verification for the formal quarantine.