The instrument shows you where.
The dashboards show you why.

A public record of what the Commonwealth charges, spends and reports, assembled from primary government sources and published so anyone can check the arithmetic. It covers tax and budget, housing, energy, education, immigration, healthcare, pensions, lobbying and Boston city data, and carries all 351 Massachusetts municipalities as a single interactive instrument.

From the bodies that produce them. Federally: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Census Bureau, the Energy Information Administration, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Massachusetts: the Department of Revenue, the Division of Local Services, DESE, the Division of Insurance, CHIA, PERAC and OCPF, with property figures from MLS and the Warren Group. Where a figure comes from a non-government compilation instead, the Method page names it.

There is no single site-wide update date, because one would only tell you when a script last ran. Each feed refreshes on its own clock, matched to when its source actually publishes, and the About page lists that schedule feed by feed. The site itself redeploys every three hours.

Yes. Every page is free and needs no account. The full source, the data files and every revision are public in the project GitHub repository, and the JSON behind each dashboard is served directly, so a script can read it.

Duncan Burns, a U.S. Air Force veteran and UMass graduate who has written op-eds for The Valley Patriot since 2016. The dashboards exist because a column can make an argument but cannot show you the arithmetic.