On a normal day, a few hundred tech deals cross the feeds we watch. Most of them never make this page, and the reasons why say more about how we work than anything on our about page. So here is the test every deal has to pass, written down.
The list price is not a price
The single most common trick in deal marketing is the anchor: a "was" price the product rarely — sometimes never — actually sold at. A monitor "reduced" from $499 to $329 is not a $170 saving if it has sold for $329 most of the year. Manufacturers set list prices high partly so that retailers can spend the rest of the product's life "discounting" it.
What matters is the street price: what the product has typically sold for over the past few months. A deal is real when it sits meaningfully below that number, not below a sticker.
Percentages hide more than they show
"40% off" a product whose list price was inflated is a worse buy than "12% off" something that almost never drops at all. Apple gear, for example, discounts rarely and shallowly — a modest cut on a MacBook is often more notable than a deep cut on a no-name tablet.
Before a bigger purchase, it is worth thirty seconds with a price-history tracker to see where today's number sits against the last year. If today's price has been matched every other week, it can wait. If it is a genuine low, it probably cannot.
It has to be good at full price
A discount on a product we would not recommend is just a smaller mistake. So the product has to clear the bar first: would a knowledgeable friend tell you to buy this at its everyday price? Only then does the discount matter. This is why the page is short. Curation means most things fail.
Why we skip most of what we see
Some patterns get a deal cut immediately: end-of-life tech being cleared out without being labelled as such (routers on old Wi-Fi standards, accessories for connectors on their way out), brands that exist only as a grid of five-star reviews with suspiciously similar phrasing, and bundles that bury one weak component inside an attractive headline.
Prices move fast — check before you buy
Our feed refreshes hourly, but good deals can sell out or expire in minutes, and retailers reprice constantly. The price on our card is what the source reported when we last checked; the price at the retailer is the one that counts. If they disagree, trust the retailer's page — and tell us, because we would rather pull a dead deal than let it sit.