Spycost - Fell for a discount again?
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Remember the last time you bought something at a discount, only to see it later for the same price without the discount? Or when the product costs more today than it did yesterday. Did you feel cheated? Are you ready to look behind the screen of manipulation and lies? Spycost helps you see when you’re paying more while thinking you’re paying less. It gives you the full price picture, so you can decide whether it’s actually worth it.
Replies
Dial
this is a real problem, fake discounts are everywhere. genuinely curious about the mechanics though - to know a price history you'd need to have been tracking a product before the "discount" showed up. does it only work for stores/products already in your database, or is there a way to check a price you're seeing for the first time?
Spycost
@omri_ben_shoham1 thanks for the thoughtful question. Right now, if a product wasn’t already being tracked, the most reliable price history starts from the moment it’s added.
But we’re actively working on making the first-time check much more useful too. Our priority is that every user can get as much price context as possible right at the moment they’re deciding, not only after waiting for weeks of tracking data.
So the goal is to improve how Spycost collects, compares, and shows price signals so you can better understand whether today’s price looks normal, inflated, or actually good, even when you’ve just discovered the product.
Strong pain point, beautiful solution, and a great launch :)
Good job, amigo.
Next Feature Idea: call bullshit on "only X seats left, etc" :P
Spycost
@knolladrian Thanks, Adrian! I love that feature idea. Fake scarcity like “only X seats left” sits in the same dark-pattern family as fake discounts, and it would be powerful to show people when that pressure is just noise. Where do you see this tactic most often: travel, SaaS, marketplaces, or somewhere else?
@glebarios From my experience, the Travel industry is the unchallenged champion of the fake scarcity tactic :)
Spycost
@knolladrian That’s a good point, and honestly a very good idea. I’ll look into this more closely and consider adding travel-specific support to Spycost, since fake scarcity seems especially common there.
The duck-spy branding got me before I even finished the tagline, nice touch. The thing I kept hitting when I built price scrapers is that a lot of retailers personalize or geo-vary the price now, and some quietly A/B test it mid-session, so 'the price yesterday' isn't one number, it's a spread. Do you snapshot from a fixed region and session so the history stays apples-to-apples, or could two people see different Spycost baselines for the same product? That's the part that decides whether the 'is this a real deal' call actually holds up over time.
Spycost
@dipankar_sarkar thank you! And glad the duck-spy made you smile :)
You’re absolutely right: “the price yesterday” is not always one clean global number anymore. It can vary by region, currency, availability, delivery rules, session, cookies, account state, or even A/B tests.
The way I’m approaching this with Spycost is to treat price history as context-specific, not as one universal baseline for everyone. So the important part is keeping the comparison apples-to-apples for the same product and tracking context. If two people are in different regions or see different store conditions, their baselines may be different, and I’d rather make that explicit than hide it behind a false single number.
Longer term, I want Spycost to show more of that context directly: region/currency, confidence, and eventually price ranges when there is enough signal. The “is this a real deal?” call only holds up if the history is honest about where the data came from.
Love the idea, I've been burned by fake discounts before, but I also wonder how often the best price is worth waiting weeks or months for.
Spycost
@reda_roqai_chaoui thank you, Reda! That's exactly the tradeoff I think about too. The goal isn't to make people wait forever for the absolute lowest price, because sometimes buying now is worth it. Spycost is more about giving you the context: was this price recently normal, is it trending down, and does the "discount" actually look real. Then you can decide whether waiting makes sense for that specific product.
Context specific is the right call. What saved us when we stored scraped prices was writing the request context into the same row as the number, so region, currency and whether we were logged in all travelled with it. Before that we lost an afternoon chasing a price drop that turned out to be a different geo answering the same URL.
Spycost
@dipankar_sarkar exactly, that’s a very useful lesson. The price itself is only half of the data; the request context has to travel with it, otherwise the history can become misleading very quickly.
That’s the direction I’m taking with Spycost too: each snapshot should be tied to the context that produced it, like region, currency, store conditions, availability, and whether it came from an anonymous or user-side session. Then the baseline is not just “this URL was X yesterday”, but “this product under this context was X yesterday”.
Your geo example is exactly the kind of false signal I want to avoid. If the data is mixed or uncertain, Spycost should make that visible instead of pretending the answer is cleaner than it really is.
HarnessRouter
Turning a pasted product link into a clean price history with alerts for drops, increases, and restocks makes the fake-discount problem much easier to judge without a dashboard full of noise. Could you let users set a target price and purchase priority so notifications reinforce their original buying plan instead of creating a new source of urgency?
Portfolio Lab
I don't even trust discounts these days for this exact reason. Will try this out!
Spycost
@rich_sun thank you! That loss of trust is exactly what pushed me to build Spycost. A discount should make a decision easier, not pressure us into buying without context. I want Spycost to show the price story clearly, so people can decide based on the real pattern, not just the label.
This is a very relatable problem. The product seems strongest if it turns “I bought too early” into a simple post-purchase routine rather than another tracker to manage. Do you monitor price drops automatically from receipts or orders, or does the user manually add each purchase?
Spycost
@simon_dao Right now the flow is user-initiated: you add the product you are thinking about buying, and Spycost tracks it from there automatically with price history and drop notifications.
I agree with you that receipts/orders would make the post-purchase use case much smoother. That is exactly the direction I want to explore next: less manual tracking, more “show me when I overpaid or when a better moment appears.” For launch, I kept it focused on planned purchases first so the core price history and fake-discount detection is reliable.
@glebarios Thanks, that focus makes sense. Planned purchases are a cleaner wedge, and it probably helps people trust the price history before you automate more of the workflow. A lightweight receipt/order import later could turn it into a useful post-purchase price memory loop, without making users manage another tracker.
"Raise the price first, then slap a discount on it" — feels like scammers all over the world are running the exact same playbook. I've honestly stopped trusting those flashy discount labels on shopping sites; too many times the "deal" was just the inflated price wearing a costume.
So I'm definitely going to give Spycost a try. Hoping this little spy-duck can see through the fake discounts for me and actually guard my wallet for once. Congrats on the launch, Hlib!
Spycost
@kryptonite_wei Thanks so much! This is exactly the frustration behind Spycost: once stores train you to doubt every flashy label, a “discount” stops being helpful and starts becoming noise.
Spycost is meant to bring the decision back to the price history: was this actually cheaper before, is it near a real low, or did the reference price suddenly jump? I hope it helps you ignore the pressure and buy only when the deal is genuinely worth it.