What is DAAM? Pakistan’s free price checker, explained simply

DAAM in one sentence

DAAM is a chat that tells you the real market price of something in Pakistan before you pay for it. The name comes from daam (دام), the Urdu word for price, and the promise is simple: know the real daam.

Prices in Pakistan are scattered. The same phone is listed at different prices on different websites, a lawn suit costs one thing in the brand’s store and another in a market, and cement rates move from one week to the next. Most people end up asking a friend, checking two or three websites, or simply trusting the shopkeeper. DAAM does that homework for you and shows its evidence.

What you can ask

You talk to DAAM the way you would ask someone who knows the market:

• “Samsung Galaxy S25 256GB PTA approved price”
• “Cement rate Lahore”
• “Khaadi lawn 3 piece unstitched price”
• “Is Rs 9,500 fair for a 20,000 mAh power bank?”
• “yeh charger kitne ka hai?”

DAAM understands English, Urdu and Roman Urdu. Product names, model numbers and brands stay as they are, and prices are always shown the same way, as Rs 123,456, with the lakh form added for big amounts.

What you get back

Every price answer follows the same structure, so you can scan it in seconds:

The numbers and links in that card are filled in from stored price observations, not written by an AI. If you want to understand each part in detail, read how to read a DAAM answer.

Checking a receipt or a quotation from a photo

Sometimes the question is not “what does this cost?” but “did I just overpay?” or “is this quote fair?”. You can send a photo of:

• a shop receipt or invoice,
• a quotation from a shop, supplier or contractor,
• a price tag or shelf label,
• a restaurant menu,
• a screenshot of an online listing.

DAAM reads the items, quantities and prices and shows them to you in an editable card first. You fix anything it misread — the storage size of a phone, the brand of cement, the city — and only then does it check each line against the market. This one step stops a blurry photo from turning into a wrong verdict. There is a full walkthrough in checking a receipt with a photo.

Where the prices come from

DAAM collects publicly listed prices from Pakistani sellers’ websites and official sources, on a schedule, and re-checks them when someone asks. Its crawler, DaamBot, identifies itself, respects each website’s robots.txt rules and limits how often it visits. Each stored price keeps:

1. the source URL it was read from,
2. the time it was observed,
3. a short evidence snippet from the page.

That is the one rule the whole product is built on: every price you see traces back to a real listing. The AI in DAAM reads, matches and explains, but it never invents a price. You can read more in how DAAM verifies prices.

What DAAM covers

DAAM focuses on four categories where overpaying is common and prices change often:

• Electronics — phones, laptops, tablets, TVs, ACs, fridges, washing machines, consoles and accessories like chargers, earbuds and power banks.
• Clothing and textiles — brand lawn and khaddar suits, kurtas, dupattas and fabric. Replicas are never compared with originals.
• Restaurants — menu prices by restaurant and branch, with delivery-app prices kept separate from dine-in.
• Construction materials — cement, sariya (steel bars), bricks, sand, crush, blocks, tiles and paint, by city.

It also compares like with like. A non-PTA phone is not shown as a “cheaper offer” for a PTA-approved one, an installment price is never mixed with a cash price, and a “master copy” lawn suit is never matched to the original.

When DAAM says “not enough evidence”

If DAAM only finds one seller for a model in your city, or the listings it has are old, it tells you exactly that — and asks the one question that would help, such as the storage size or the city. It will not fill the gap with a guess. That can feel less satisfying than a confident number, but a confident wrong number is how people get overcharged. Why DAAM sometimes says “not enough evidence” explains this in more detail.

Is DAAM free?

Yes. You can start asking without an account. There is a daily limit on checks so the service stays fast and affordable to run, and signing in with Google gives you more checks per day and lets you set price-drop alerts: DAAM tells you when a verified, in-stock offer for something you asked about gets cheaper.

Privacy in short

Photos are resized in your browser before upload, which removes location data, and they are cleaned again on the server. They are used only to read prices and are deleted after 30 days. Names, phone numbers and card numbers are redacted from anything DAAM keeps. If you choose to share a price anonymously to help others, DAAM stores the product, price, city and month — never your account.