Discover Spycost, an indie hacker product that tracks real price histories and saves you from falling into the psychological trap of fake discounts.
Have you ever happily bought something on a 50% discount, only to find out a week later that its "original" price was exactly the same? It feels like getting scammed by a recruiter who promised a performance-based raise that never came.
Today, let's talk about Spycost — a product that recently launched on Product Hunt, racking up 314 upvotes. It was born out of pure frustration by a developer who loves shopping but hates being manipulated by dark patterns.
Created by maker Hlib, Spycost was born because he kept breaking his own purchase priority lists. Every time he saw an "attractive offer" or a flash sale, he bought things he didn't need, only to realize later that the discount was either fake or not as good as advertised.
Feeling like he was voluntarily inviting thieves into his house, Hlib decided to code his own price tracker.
The premise is simple: You paste a product link, and the tool tracks its price history over time. This gives you the full picture so you can decide if the "deal" is actually a steal or just marketing BS.
As soon as it went live, the Product Hunt crowd dug in. Here are the main talking points:
One user loved the duck-as-a-spy branding but asked a very logical technical question: "When I add a product today, do you backfill its price history from somewhere, or does the chart only start from the moment I add it?"
Hlib candidly replied: "Right now we don’t backfill old data: the price history starts accumulating from the moment you add a product."
He admitted this can be slightly inconvenient at first, but argued it’s actually a feature that prevents impulsive buying. He also shared an interesting insight: large retailers, especially in electronics, change prices almost daily. For example, he tracked an Elegoo 3D printer and saw 7 price changes in a single month, with a €40 gap between highs and lows. He is planning to add AI models to predict these fluctuations.
An experienced scraper dev jumped in to share a hard-earned lesson: When storing scraped prices, you must bundle the metadata (request context) like region, currency, and login state in the same database row.
He shared: "We once lost an entire afternoon chasing a price drop that turned out to be a different geographic location answering the same URL."
Hlib agreed, stating that Spycost’s roadmap includes tying every price snapshot to its specific request context to avoid displaying misleading data.
Of course, no launch is safe from QA devs. One hunter ran a manual pass and spotted a bug: the Pricing page was stuck on a perpetual "Loading available plans..." state because the plan data wasn't in the served HTML. Hlib immediately thanked him and moved the conversation to LinkedIn for a quick hotfix.
Hlib's approach to building Spycost is the gold standard for indie hackers: Scratch your own itch first. If you solve your own problem, chances are thousands of others have the same issue.
However, if you want to build your own version of this, scraping modern e-commerce sites is an absolute nightmare. Major platforms will block your requests faster than you can say 'deprecated'. To avoid constantly getting hit with 403 errors, you'll need a solid Proxy to unlock limitless web data collection solution. Once you have that configured, deploy your scraping scripts on a robust vultr VPS, schedule some cron jobs, and let the data roll in.
At the end of the day, remember: discounts are psychological warfare. Stop trusting the red tags and start looking at the actual data charts.
Source: Product Hunt
