What a watch actually costs to keep
Published service intervals and prices, computed over 10 and 20 years. The number nobody else publishes.
Updates
Recently updated
What changed, when, and why. Dates here move only when the content does.
Most sites in this category treat freshness as a formatting problem — re-stamp every page on every deploy and hope Google reads it as activity. We do the opposite: a page's date moves only when its content actually changes, which makes the date worth something.
That is not a small distinction. If a sitemap claims every page changed today, and then again tomorrow, a crawler learns to ignore the field entirely — and the one honest signal we have for "this roundup was genuinely refreshed, come and look" is gone.
What changes, and when
- A watch is discontinued or leaves Amazon. The pick is replaced and the page is re-dated.
- A manufacturer revises service pricing or a warranty term. Everything downstream is updated, including the cost of ownership arithmetic.
- A specification we published turns out to be wrong. Corrected, noted on the page, re-dated. That commitment is written into the editorial policy.
- A new page ships. It appears in the list below and in the Atom feed the day it goes live.
Every page in this section
Start here
Buy it for life
Watches that last a lifetime
The criteria for a forty-year watch, then eight that meet them. The flagship page here.
Top pick
Seiko Prospex Alpinist SPB317J1
Keep Score 9.6/10
Sold direct by Seiko
We earn nothing on this link. Seiko sells it directly.
Automatic watch servicing and what it costs
Published service prices by caliber, what a service includes, and when to skip one.
Top pick
Seiko Prospex Alpinist SPB317J1
Keep Score 9.6/10
Sold direct by Seiko
We earn nothing on this link. Seiko sells it directly.
Water resistance explained
What 30m, 100m and 200m actually permit — and why the rating degrades with age.
Worth it?
Are microbrand watches worth it?
The microbrand trade in full: what you gain, what you risk, and whether they hold value.
Top pick
Spinnaker Bradner SP-5062-33
Keep Score 8.0/10
$199.00 · View on Amazon
#ad Affiliate link · Price as of October 23, 2026
What launched with the site
Dial & Lug launched in September 2026 with the complete structure below: six sections, a full product registry where every specification was read from a manufacturer document, and the two pages the whole site is built around — what a watch costs to keep and watches that last a lifetime.
Every watch in the registry carries a link to the manufacturer page its specifications came from. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing — Casio's US product pages, for instance, are not readable by us — the page says so rather than filling the gap.
What is next
- Per-caliber guides — the 4R36, NH35, Miyota 9015 and Powermatic 80, each with the service data attached.
- More budget tiers — $150, $400, $750 and $1,500, since the gaps between the current tiers are where most of the real decisions happen.
- Per-microbrand profiles, starting with the ones whose specifications and warranty terms are actually published.
- More brand pages — Bulova, Certina, Mido, Longines and Victorinox, as and when we can source their documentation properly.
Subscribe to the Atom feed if you want new pages as they ship, or check the sitemap for everything currently published.
Questions people actually ask
Why is there no blog with opinion pieces?
Because we would be writing opinions about watches we have not handled, which is precisely the thing this site exists not to do. What we can add value on is compiled, cited specification work — so that is what gets published.
How do I know a page was genuinely updated?
The date at the top of each page moves only when its content changes, and the same dates drive the sitemap and the feed. We do not re-stamp pages on deploy, which is the standard trick for faking freshness.
How can I follow new pages?
The Atom feed at /feed.xml lists the twenty most recently updated pages with excerpts. It is excerpt-only rather than full-text, deliberately.
