Pricepulse - Price Drop Alerts

Handy app, especially for those who buy foods, cleaning products, and other items that need occasional replenishment. You can watch for price drops, timing your buys to maximize your savings. The home page looks like an old geocities web page created by a hyperactive Coke addict. There are videos, bouncing graphics, spinning wheels, etc, all going at the same time. Took off a star for the deceptive wheel you “spin” to gamble away points you’ve accrued. Although the wheel has equal-sized sections to make you think you have equal chances of stopping on any given section, it’s rigged. Your chances of it stopping on the big win section are much lower than the graphic would suggest.

PricePulse does what it claims to do…kind of. More often than not, notifications about price drops are just wrong. “This item is it’s lowest price ever.” But the graph on the item’s page shows that that is false. Lots of situations like that. You do get notified when there are price drops. You just can’t rely on the notification to accurately describe the price drop. Another annoyance is the lack of global settings for things you can set on individual settings. For instance, I want to mark everything on all of my lists as “free shipping only.” I can’t do that. I have to do that on a per-item basis, which seems great until you remember your wishlist of 200 books. Just a global toggle for anything that you can edit on individual items to set that flag for everything all at once would be nice.

The only two things I would suggest would be: Being able to view the price history over time as a graph, per year, and for the totality of the data Pricepulse can obtain. I find myself having to look through each item’s long list trying to find the lowest price and guesstimating when during the year it drops. Not having to do this manually and incorrectly would be amazing! And the second thing would be being notified on the first photo and price and percentage off if Pricepulse sees the range of the price not differing much. Just as a check mark or some sort of icon alongside, because I’ve noticed that there are lower percentage off items being shown, but it doesn’t tell me whether or not that item bounces its prices way up or down at other times.