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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

What is the alternative? Is there an open source version that is community curated?

Signing up for stuff. Pretty much every online retailer will pay you via discount for your email address.

I set up a specific junk email address for this purpose and give to every retailer I shop with for their initial x% discount, and I receive coupon codes going forward.

From what I can tell, this is the best way to get discounts. Retailers are generous with people they know a lot about. The flip side is that you're going to be a target for their tricks. If you click on a link or add something to your cart, they are going to send you reminders and even more discounts to get you to buy that item.

Personally, I've been happy with this setup. I only see the promo spam when I want to. And my email becomes a personalized coupon code search engine that contains much better deals than you could get by using retailmenot or similar sites.

You basically also end up needing a burner phone number for these too nowadays. Feels like every one of these I’ve tried in recent months starts with “sign up for 10% off” with an email input, followed by “one more step, give us your phone number!”

I know it’s better to do this sort of thing yourself (or just set up a domain forwarder) but honestly, iCloud’s Hide My Email feature is so nice for this. Of course Apple can still link your spoof addresses to your parent iCloud account, but less-reputable marketing data companies don’t have visibility into that.

I toss "10OFF" into almost every promo box when I buy something. Works at least 25% of the time. When it does I try "20OFF" and that works as well like 5% of the time.

Reminds me of the 777 code on Dreamhost

I set that up on an older web host and got referral credits for a few years :)

Also the current year can yield results sometimes (ie: 2025).

Another tip that works especially well on Shopify sites is to add the item to your cart and then abandon the page. You'll usually get an email or text (depending on your Shopify settings) for some discount code to entice you to finish the purchase.

The alternative to a company that is hiding real coupon codes and stealing affiliate marketing dollars?

Honestly, there's no good answer here because most of the work is manual, not automated, and there are a lot of opportunities for bad actors. It's just a bad model in general.

I don't think it exists today, but someone could make a crowdsourced extension like SponsorBlock. That also eliminate the concern about hiding promo codes for companies who pay.

There are legit communities which already collect that information in structured ways. For example https://www.ozbargain.com.au/ is quite Australia-oriented, but could be turned into an extension bringing up the coupon codes automatically.

We've been working on a product called Ketch AI that does some similar things but hopefully adds more value further up the chain.

We track sales from retailers, and use historic sales information to recommend if the sale is good or not (ex some retailers always have XX% off, so you only want to jump on sales that are better than that). In addition, we'll let you sign up for digest alerts, so ideally you get 1 notification a day with all the good sales across all the brands you shop at, rather than hundreds of spammy marketing emails a day.

We don't clickjack affiliate links like Honey, and don't have deals with retailers incentivizing us to promote deals that are worse for the consumer.

Check us out at https://getketch.ai, or start browsing brands at https://members.getketch.ai/brands to get a feel for the product if you're interested

> We don't clickjack affiliate links like Honey, and don't have deals with retailers incentivizing us to promote deals that are worse for the consumer.

So where is your revenue planned to come from?

To be honest? The majority of discount culture is a disgusting trap where retailers inflate default MSRPs and manipulate price histories so they can put big percent signs on the products to bring them down to normal and FOMO/gouge anyone with time constraints.

T-shirts and vacuums aren't perishable. Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners and big signs and calculations every time I want to buy anything.

It's like an app for finding out the minimum you have to tip for a waitress to be able to survive. Maybe that's not the solution.

But I'm also just a grouch these days...

>Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners and big signs and calculations every time I want to buy anything.

Ahh, so you're JC Penney:

https://www.choicehacking.com/2022/11/24/the-psychological-f...

sadly, in some ways engaged customers want to feel like their efforts pay off in "smarter" deals. and that mind game overcomes any genuine attempts to lay everything up front.

Syrup. https://github.com/Abdallah-Alwarawreh/Syrup

Looks like that's a frontend for https://discountdb.ch/ which is basically a https://www.retailmenot.com/ that nobody seems to use.

You'd think there would be a market for something OSS here. It would be problematic to keep clean/useful...

This is why I’m keeping it for now. I am still better off than not having it.

Retailmenot.com

I want to like RetailMeNot but every time I try it, I very seldom come across functioning coupon codes. I don't understand what incentivizes people to submit bogus codes.

Perhaps they are expired codes, or if it's a link (and not something to copy-and-paste) — affiliate marketing.

It feels like it has been ruined by greed and grift like RottenTomatoes and generally everything on the internet.

The codes are probably legit. There's just no incentive for anyone to clean up dead codes nor submit fresh ones except for the coupon providers themselves who might see retailmenot as a marketing angle, which seems to be very few.

Except they often come with “added today”, “verified today” BS.

Just like travel sites where you can book some remote roadside run of the mill in Wyoming for mid week, winter next year, and be told “14 people have booked this hotel today, hurry”.

No, they haven’t. Or certainly not for that date.

I think nowadays some codes may even be limited in usage precisely because of such communities. they don't want millions to use a good deal with no payoff, so they limit certain codes to X000 and they die quickly. The library paradox.

They inject their affiliate code just like Honey does. Why do you think they open a new tab that loads the retailer's site when you click to show the coupon code?

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