Methodology
How it works
The digest is a small operation run in the open. Here is exactly how an issue gets built — and where its limits are.
What the digest is
Every Friday morning (US Central), subscribers get one email with 8–12 entries, scannable in under four minutes. Each entry is one line of name, vendor, price, and deadline, plus one line on why it matters, plus a link. The sections always run in the same order:
- Closing Soon — group buys and preorders ending within 7 days
- New Group Buys — buys that opened in the last week
- Restocks — in-stock returns of previously sold-out items
- Price Drops — real discounts: retailer sales and coupon codes with named expiry dates
- Artisan Drops — limited artisan sales and raffles opening or closing that week
- Watchlist — things not to buy: overpriced extras, dead group-buy pages, fake strikethrough "deals"
Sources
We track vendors' own pages first: group-buy listings, new-arrival pages, restock feeds, and retailer sale pages. We also watch community group-buy calendars and feeds as an early-warning layer. We only link first-party pages — if a deal can't be reached from the vendor's own site, we say so in the entry instead of linking somewhere else.
Verification
Every entry is checked live within 24 hours of publish. That means:
- The page loads and the listing is actually live
- The price and the deadline match what we print
- Anything that can't be re-verified ships tagged [UNVERIFIED] — or gets cut
- Contradictory page signals (a "completed group buy" badge next to future dates, a "closed" page with an open window) mean the entry is cut or flagged, never assumed
- Coupon codes must have a named expiry date. Expired codes are dropped, not recycled
This is why the digest sometimes runs shorter than the 8–12 target: quality over padding. If only seven entries check out, we send seven.
Deal scores
Paid-tier deal scores are built from a fixed, deterministic rubric — the same inputs always produce the same score. The five factors are:
- Price history — how the current price compares to what we've tracked
- Urgency — how close the deadline is
- Stock — whether availability is actually constrained
- Velocity — how fast comparable drops have sold out
- Value — the price against comparable alternatives
An honest cold start: price history starts accumulating from Issue #1, so early scores are honest zeros — we score missing data as zero rather than estimating. Scores will start to differentiate after a few months of history. The scores gate instant alerts; the weekly digest itself carries editorial judgment either way.
Honest limits
- We track prices; we don't guarantee savings. Nothing in the digest is a promise that you'll save money.
- We can't catch everything. If we miss a drop you care about, reply to any issue and tell us — we'll add it and fix the gap.
- Weekly isn't instant. Some drops sell out in 30 minutes. The free digest is weekly by design; instant alerts are what the founding membership is for.
- We flag bad deals too. The Watchlist exists because a digest that only ever says "buy" isn't worth reading. Some links earn us a commission — it doesn't change what we include.