Under every amount in the comparison you will see the phrase “an estimate, not an offer”. It is the most important phrase on the site, and it is worth explaining.
We hold no company prices
None. We hold no rate book from any insurer, we connect to none of them in real time, and none of them sends us prices. Every amount you see here we work out ourselves, with a calculation that is published in full on how we calculate.
This is not an admission of weakness. There is no public motor tariff in Greece: no company publishes what it charges, and no body collects it. A site that tells you it has “the prices of the market” is telling you about something that does not exist.
What the estimate is made of
Two things, and we keep them apart because they do not carry the same weight.
Public data. Somebody else publishes it and you can check it yourself: ΕΑΕΕ, the Bank of Greece, ΕΛΣΤΑΤ and Eurostat, the annual solvency reports of the companies themselves, and the published terms and information documents of the products. Every figure we take from them appears with its source and its data year, on the page that uses it.
Our own assumptions. The shape of the curves, that is how far the premium climbs with age, with engine size or with region, is published by nobody. It is our assumption. We write it out in full, table by table, and it is where the calculation can be most wrong.
Where it can be wrong
The calculation does not necessarily reflect the market as it is today. Companies change their pricing without announcing it, they run discounts we cannot see, and their form asks thirty things where ours asks seven. The price they give you can come out above or below our estimate.
That is why every amount carries a range beside it, and why the order of the ranking is more reliable than the amount itself. The calculation knows well who comes out cheaper than whom, and less well by exactly how much.
Why we say it on every row
Because an estimate and a company price look identical on a screen. Nothing in the look of an amount shows where it came from. And a comparison site is worth exactly what its amounts are worth.
The only honest thing anybody can do with an estimate is to say that it is an estimate, and where it came from. Only the insurance company gives a binding price, after an application.