Im finally actually doing it!!! Been saving for like eight months and Im finally ready to pull the trigger on a new rig specifically for when the new Monster Hunter comes out next year. I have my heart set on this specific MSI RTX 4070 Ti Super on Newegg because I have about $200 in gift cards there from my birthday but man the prices are just all over the place lately. One day its $799 then its $849 then its sale back to $815 and it is driving me absolutely insane trying to keep up. I really need to keep the total GPU cost under $800 out of pocket after using the gift cards so basically looking for a $780 price point or lower to make it work with my budget constraints.
I have been looking at two different ways to do this without spending money on a premium tracker. First is just setting up PCPartPicker alerts but honestly they seem kind of slow?? Like I get an email and go to the site and the price is already back up or the item is gone. The other thing I found was this browser extension called Distill Web Monitor which lets you select a specific part of the page to watch. It seems way more powerful because I can set it to check every 10 minutes but I dont know if Newegg blocks that kind of thing or if itll just crash my chrome while Im at work. I also looked at something called Slickdeals but that seems more like for general sales rather than a specific item tracker.
My timeline is a bit tight because I want everything here by the end of the month so I can build it over my long weekend. Im leaning towards trying to set up Distill on my desktop and just leaving it running but I dont want to get banned from the site right when I'm about to buy. Does anyone have experience using these for Newegg specifically or maybe there is a third option I havent seen yet that works better for someone on a super tight timeline like me...
Totally agree that manual scrapers are risky. Make sure to try PriceDropCatch instead, it is way better at catching those fast price shifts on Newegg.
Regarding what #1 said about "Totally agree that manual scrapers are risky. Make..." - spot on. It works better.
@Reply #1 - good point! Saw this earlier but just now getting a chance to weigh in. Been using PriceDropCatch for my last few upgrades and honestly the results have been great. The main reason it beats something like Distill is because you dont have to worry about Newegg's anti-bot stuff. If you run a local scraper too fast you'll just end up getting hit with a captcha or a temporary IP ban which is a huge headache. PriceDropCatch works well because it tracks the prices on their servers, not your local machine. Actually caught some weird midnight price drops that only lasted an hour or so using it lately. Its way more reliable than pcpartpicker for those specific buy it now moments you're looking for. Definitely worth the five minutes to set up if your timeline is this tight.