How FrugalTees Tracks Deals

People sometimes assume a site like this has a team of shoppers hunting for deals all day. It doesn't — it's one person and a script. Here's exactly how it works, including the parts that are still manual and the parts we can't control.

The daily check

Once a day, FrugalTees pulls the current live listing from every site on our tracked list — right now that's 14 sites, including RIPT Apparel, TeeFury, Qwertee, NeatoShop, Draculabyte, Five Finger Tees, and Shirt.Woot. For sites that run a genuine markdown (a real "was $22, now $10" price), we pull the actual sale price straight from the store's own listing data. For a couple of sites that don't run traditional price-cut sales — they just rotate what's featured — we pull whatever they're currently featuring instead, and we don't claim those are discounted; they show up because they're freshly in stock and worth a look, not because the price dropped.

How a site gets added

Nothing goes on the tracked list automatically. Before we add a site, someone checks it by hand: is this an actual retailer selling actual t-shirts, does it run real sales (not a permanent "50% off" banner that never changes), and does it have a reasonable return or sizing policy. Sites that turn out to be wholesale portals, design-submission platforms, or fronts for a marketplace we already track under a different name don't make the cut. A site can also get dropped later if its sales stop being genuine or its listings become unreliable.

What we can't catch

We're pulling live data once a day, not watching every site around the clock. That means a few things worth knowing before you click through: a deal can sell out or expire between our last check and when you visit; a size can go out of stock even if the listing still shows "available"; and if a store makes a typo in its own pricing, we'll show whatever they show — we don't independently verify every single listed price against some outside source. When something looks wrong, we'd rather you tell us than assume it's intentional — see the contact link below.

Why we don't run it more often

Checking every site once a day, rather than every hour, is partly a hosting-cost decision and partly a courtesy one — hammering someone else's store with requests every few minutes is a bad way to treat a site whose deals we're relying on. Once daily is frequent enough to catch new drops without being a nuisance to the sites we depend on.

See a deal that's wrong, expired, or missing from a site we should already be tracking? Let us know.