Data Sources
Where our green fee data comes from and how we assess its reliability.
Primary sources
Course tee sheets and booking pages
· HighThe most authoritative source for any golf course is its own published rate schedule. This includes the course's direct website, their booking calendar (GolfNow, TeeSnap, EZLinks, CourseMerchant, and others), and any published rate card. Where a course publishes structured weekday, weekend, and twilight rates, we capture and normalize them to a standard format. This is our first-choice source for every course.
Direct phone and web verification
· HighestFor courses that don't publish rates publicly, courses where the published rate is ambiguous (cart-included status is frequently unclear), and courses where we suspect a rate change, we contact the course directly. Rates confirmed through direct contact are tagged as phone-verified and are treated as the highest-confidence data in our database.
Google Places
· HighWe pull Google Maps ratings and review counts for courses in our database. This data is retrieved directly from Google and updated on a regular schedule. We use it for our 'best value' metric (price-to-rating ratio) and display it alongside green fee data on course pages.
User-submitted corrections
· Medium — verified before publishingGolfers who have recently played a course often have the most current rate information, especially for weekend rates, holiday surcharges, and twilight deals that aren't always published consistently. We review every user-submitted correction before it is applied to the database. See our Correction Policy for details.
What we do not use
- Aggregator sites that republish or estimate rates without primary source verification
- AI-generated or estimated pricing — every rate in our database is sourced from an identifiable primary source
- Prices from online classified listings, Craigslist, or informal player forums (though tips from players may prompt us to verify a rate directly with a course)
- Rates from courses that are not open to the public or do not accept walk-in tee times
Source labeling
Every course in our database displays the source and recency of its pricing data so you can assess confidence before relying on it. The labels we use:
Rate confirmed directly with course staff.
Rate sourced from the course's own published page, verified within the last 90 days.
Rate sourced from the course website but not re-verified in over 90 days.
The course does not publish rates and did not provide a rate when contacted. Call the course directly for current pricing.
Technical infrastructure
Our course and market database is hosted on Supabase (PostgreSQL). Data collection, normalization, and quality checks run on a scheduled basis. Our monitoring system flags significant rate changes for manual review before they are published.