[LONGSHOT] Passionate appeal to community - Costco price tracker

[dcsev]

Let me preface this that I've been using price trackers like Camelcamelcamel.com to track Amazon prices for a long time.  I discovered one of the most incredible and hidden gems on the web-- Pricecase.com. Pricecaseis a price and stock tracker for sites like Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart and most importantly, Costco.  It is the ONLY site on the web that reliably evaluates COSTCO.COM prices for sales/price drops/in stock

Unfortunately, the site is and has been experiencing severe database issues and is unreliable at best. I've talked to the author and he mentioned he created as a side hobby project and doesn't have the time to maintain it. A little part of me died inside because I can't tell you how many bargains this useful site has given me.  Costco cleared out a $300 X-mas tree for $99.99 (Now it's $400!) shipped. This saved our Christmas last year when someone stole ours.


Someone please, please come up with a solution.  Can an individual program be programmed similarly run locally to scrape for the information every so often and send an email or notification of some sort?   

For those of us in the USA, Costco online has some of the cheapest prices on Earth. The deals you can get for clearance items is insane at times and we've saved thousands after there's been price drops for items we bought.  I can't believe no one else has created a price tracker for Costco online because it gives the user a leg up in snatching deals before others.

Before anyone suggests change detection sites - they often times do not work, don't have stock detection and have a multitude of false negatives / positives.   I also tried WEBSITE-WATCHER but even after studying it, it gives about 20 false positives a day even with the screenshot method


Is anyone willing or able to code something that would help detect stock alerts and price changes for Costco.com?  There is no other solution on the web. I know there's blogs like frugalhotspot  & Costco97, but they are not live and specific to specific products.--- believe me I consider myself the expert at Costco.

Someone please help.

[4wd]

I've talked to the author and he mentioned he created as a side hobby project and doesn't have the time to maintain it.

-dcsev (November 27, 2019, 04:51 AM)

Have you approached him about having someone else take it over since he's almost abandoned it?

It would save a lot of duplicated effort.

[dcsev]

So I want to issue a correction.  I think he might have changed his mind a little and is going to try and move to another host in a few weeks.   I did request the source code should he ever decide to give up completely on the site (assuming Costco still worked at the time).


In the past 24 hours, it's sent me an In Stock alert for a hot item, saved me $55 and potentially $20 for my parents. I love Costco!