How We Score Deals

Every Deal Score on this site is arithmetic, not opinion. Here is the entire formula — the same one our software runs, with nothing held back.

The Problem With “70% OFF”

Retail discounts are measured against list prices, and list prices are fiction with a dollar sign. A product that has sold for $449 every day since March is not “28% off” because someone typed $599 into a field once. So we ignore the banner and measure against the number that can't be staged: what the product has actually sold for, hour by hour, over the last 90 days.

Our price data comes from the Keepa API, which tracks Amazon pricing continuously. Our software sweeps every product on our watchlist every four hours and recomputes everything below.

The Deal Score, Factor by Factor

Scores run 1.0–10.0 and are recomputed on every sweep. Five components, fully disclosed:

up to 5

points

Depth below the 90-day average

The core signal. We pull each product's rolling 90-day Amazon average and measure how far today's price sits below it. 10% below earns 2 points; 25% or more maxes the factor out. A "sale" that matches the average earns exactly nothing.

up to 2

points

Depth below list price

The discount everyone else advertises. We count it — but it's worth at most 2 points, because list prices are marketing and rolling averages are reality.

up to 1

points

Proximity to the recent low

Matching the recent tracked low earns a full point; within 5% of it earns half. If the product was cheaper two weeks ago, the score says so.

up to 1

points

Absolute dollars saved

Percentages flatter cheap products. $150+ of real savings earns a full point, $50+ earns half — so a big discount on a big-ticket item outranks a huge discount on a phone case.

points

Base: verified price data exists

Every scored deal starts from actual tracked data. No history, no score — we'd rather show nothing than guess.

8.5–10Exceptional

7–8.4Strong Deal

5.5–6.9Solid

Under 5.5We don't feature it

What Gets Published (and What Doesn't)

A product enters the site only when its live price drops at least 10% below its 90-day average. When the price recovers to within 3% of that average, the deal is automatically pulled — usually before the retailer updates their own banner. Deals from secondary sources (community feeds, editor submissions) enter as unpublished drafts until the same price verification passes.

Every listing also clears a structural check before publishing — working product image, sane price math, functioning outbound link. If any of it fails, the deal is held for human review instead of going live broken.

Where the Money Comes From

When you buy through our links, Amazon pays us a commission from their side of the transaction — your price is identical either way. That commission funds the price tracking. It does not touch the scores: the formula above has no field for “what pays us more,” and a weak deal scores weak no matter whose link it wears. Full details in our affiliate disclosure and editorial process.

See the scores in action →