Lets Find A Deal!

When the 50lb brains at DARPA were laying the foundations for the internet I am pretty sure they were not thinking "this is going to revolutionize how people buy things!"  Who knew that a tool originally designed to help defeat the Soviet Union or mitigate the impact of a war with would ultimately become one of the greatest tools of the capitalist economy?  For all its various impacts on our lives, I think the greatest impact is in how things are bought and sold in this country.  The internet has flattened the arbitrage factor in almost everything we buy.  No longer can a local retailer charge above market price simply because of lack of knowledge.  With a few keystrokes, anyone can find the range of market prices for an item and make a decision about a purchase.  Beyond the direct impact on individual items, all retailers have to take the internet into consideration for every item.  Some smart person will probably put a number on it but I know the internet dramatically increases the purchasing power of my household. But.......

There is always a but.  And the but here is time.  Finding those deals can consume more time than they are worth (time is money).  As I said in the mission statement of this blog, DPOAB about people on a budget of both time and money.  One of the other great advances the internet has allowed is the ability to leverage the input of millions.  What might take one person hours to do can be spread across the masses who only spend a few minutes.  That collective effort results in a huge number of "Deal" websites.  So many that even they can become time consumers!

Over the years I have frequented tons of deal sites.  Some are better than others, some have gone away and some have gone rouge.  Two have risen to the top of my link list and are in my batch of websites I visit every day without fail - dealmac and Passwired.

Dealmac is actually the Macintosh oriented subsite of Dealnews.  Dealnews has been around since 1997 and has grown from purely user submitted content to a full time professional staff with a range of subsites.  (Full disclosure - back in the 90's I regularly submitted deals to dealmac and a number were published on the site.  I received no compensation other than seeing my name linked to the deal)

Dealmac - not just Macintosh deals.  Back in the days of SCSI, ADB and NuBus, dealmac was an important source of deals on hardware and software you could trust would work on your mac.  These days just about the only things that are not cross platform are specific software titles.  I find dealmac is more tech oriented than dealnews but I dont know if that is just my personal bias.  You still get all the Photo, storage and general deal news here, just a little more limited.

Dealram - A GREAT tool for finding solid state memory of all types.  It is especially useful in finding the right memory for your system.  You can put in your make and model and you will only see ram modules that fit your system.  

Dealcam - much less useful than dealram.  I dont think it gets updated as often.  I prefer the Photo section of dealmac.  

Dealcoupon - I always check here before finishing a purchase online.  If there is a coupon code for free shipping or X% off, you will find it here.  I can't count the number of times it has saved me money on something I was going to buy anyway.

Styenotes - the newest site, centered on clothes.  I haven't used it much but I have bought lots of clothes from the links in dealmac so I imagine it will be great.

Much of the content is repeated across the full range of sites.  I use dealmac as my starting point and then go to the subsites if I am looking for something specific.  The Photo section on both dealmac and dealnews is excellent and they regularly post coupon codes for free or shipping only deals on processing.  The last one I used got me six 8x8 photobooks for the cost of shipping only.

Passwird - Run by a UCSB senior, Passwird is generally tech focused but has a full range of deals.  The owner started the site when he was in high school and his specialty is finding bizarre combinations of codes and pricing mistakes to generate free or nearly free stuff (which he then sells on eBay!).  He is also a master of figuring out how to game the Dell website to get GREAT deals on computers.  Both my Dell laptops and one desktop were bought using instructions from Passwird.  As an example, one laptop started as a bottom of the line POS but by choosing the right upgrades and a couple of stacked coupons I got a high end gaming class notebook for $1000 (2007).  The same system purchased "normally" from Dell was over $1500 plus shipping.  Passwird is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get, but you can scroll through the days deals in less than a minute.

I can get through both Passwird and Dealmac in about three minutes.  Both have simple layouts and both have rss feeds.  If I am looking for something specific, I always start at Dealmac and work from there.  Passwird is the first deal site I check every morning (ok, Ill admit it, at night too) because many of the deals on there are very short lived.  Both are great tools for the Digital Photographer On A Budget.