
What a watch actually costs to keep
Published service intervals and prices, computed over 10 and 20 years. The number nobody else publishes.

Updates
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.
Every page in this section

Published service intervals and prices, computed over 10 and 20 years. The number nobody else publishes.

Buy it for life
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
#ad Affiliate link · We publish no price we have not verified today

Published service prices by caliber, what a service includes, and when to skip one.

Seiko
Three-year warranty, published overhaul prices by caliber, and nine watches ranked.
Top pick
Seiko Prospex Alpinist SPB317J1
Keep Score 9.6/10
#ad Affiliate link · We publish no price we have not verified today

What 30m, 100m and 200m actually permit — and why the rating degrades with age.

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
#ad Affiliate link · We publish no price we have not verified today
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.
Subscribe to the Atom feed if you want new pages as they ship, or check the sitemap for everything currently published.
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.
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.
The Atom feed at /feed.xml lists the twenty most recently updated pages with excerpts. It is excerpt-only rather than full-text, deliberately.