How we score deals

Most deal sites compare today's price to a list price the merchant chose. We compare it to what the product has actually sold for.

The baseline

We prefer the freshest honest evidence we have. If we have captured a price for this product at all in the last 90 days, we score against the 90-day median — the price you would have paid on a typical recent day, however thin that recent history is.

If nothing has been captured in the last 90 days, but we do have prices from the last 12 months, we fall back to the 365-day median instead. Stale evidence is still real evidence, and it beats a manufacturer's number.

Only when we have never observed this product sell at all do we fall back to the manufacturer's MSRP, and we say so on the card.

If we have observed history for this product but every capture is more than a year old, we don't show a score at all. Reaching for MSRP at that point would flatter the discount with a price nobody has actually paid recently, so we say nothing instead of something misleading.

We never present a merchant's own "was" price as a baseline. If that is all we have, the deal does not appear at all.

Confidence

Every score carries a confidence chip, and it reflects the evidence behind the baseline we actually used — not how much history exists elsewhere.

• 90-day median: "high" needs at least 90 days of history across two or more merchants, "medium" needs at least 30 days, and anything thinner is "low".
• 12-month median: capped at "medium" — the evidence is stale by definition, so it is never "high", and thinner than 30 days is "low".
• MSRP: always "low", because there is no market evidence behind a list price at all.