How We Find & Verify Deals

1. Where listings come from

Hack the Deal pulls from three kinds of sources, all fetched automatically on a recurring schedule:

• Reddit deal communities — r/buildapcsales, r/GameDeals, r/AppleDeals, r/PS5Deals, r/SwitchDeals, r/tradingcards, and r/photomarket. These are the same communities deal-hunters already use; we're reading the same public posts you could browse there yourself.
• Deal-aggregator RSS feeds — Slickdeals, DealNews, 9to5Toys, and 9to5Mac's deals feed, covering categories those Reddit communities don't (fashion, beauty, travel, software, cameras).
• Direct-from-vendor sale feeds — retailers like Pyrodrone, RaceDayQuads, Elegoo, Anycubic, Sovol, Polymaker, and Overture publish their own "on sale" collections, which we read straight from the source rather than through a middleman aggregator.

2. How a listing gets a category and a price

Each post's title is parsed for a price, an original ("was") price, a discount percentage, and a merchant name — the same information a human skimming the title would pick out. A listing is scored on how much of that it actually contains: a title with a clear price, a clear discount, and a named merchant scores higher than one with just a product name and a link.

Listings below that confidence threshold don't get published. This is a filter for how clearly a deal was described, not a live price-verification service — we don't independently re-check every retailer's price in real time, so always confirm the price on the retailer's own page before buying, which every deal card and permalink page on this site links straight to.

3. Why deals disappear

Every listing is dropped automatically 30 days after it was posted, and pages that were live for expired deals are deleted rather than left up as stale, dead-looking content. A small number of sources that consistently produced low-quality or misleading listings have been removed from the source list entirely rather than filtered after the fact.

4. What "Sponsored" means here

Everything described above is unpaid — a listing shows up because it matched a source and cleared the confidence threshold, not because anyone paid for placement. Sponsored placements are a separate, clearly labeled category (see our partnerships page), and every affiliate link on the site — sponsored or not — carries a rel="sponsored" attribute and the disclosure banner shown at the top of every page.

See also our Privacy Policy for the full data/cookies breakdown, and our Terms of Use for deal-accuracy and liability terms. Questions or a correction on something we got wrong? Get in touch.