How Glitchfinder catches a price error
Anatomy of a glitch: from the moment a retailer mistypes a price to the moment a Discord message lands in your phone.
Price errors are short-lived by design. The retailer fixes them within minutes once the orders start landing. Most public deal sites surface a glitch only after it's already been patched. Our job is to compress the loop from 'a price went weird' to 'you got a Discord ping' down to single-digit minutes.
1. Watch what you actually want
You add a target — a product URL, a flight route on a specific date, a hotel city for a specific stay, or a SKU you're flipping. The system polls that target every 15 minutes by default; you can dial it tighter for hot windows.
2. Per-vertical scrapers
Retail uses a per-host router. Best Buy / Newegg / Lowe's / Target / Tractor Supply have direct cheerio scrapers that work without proxies. Home Depot + Walmart go through SerpAPI's google_shopping engine, because their bot stacks (Akamai + PerimeterX) block raw fetches. Travel + hotel use SerpAPI's google_flights and google_hotels engines respectively. Every parsed price is gated by a 5%-of-list-price floor — if a scrape comes in below 5% of the known list, we reject it as a parser error rather than alert on it.
3. Detector + dedup
Each new price is compared against a rolling 16-sample baseline (median) and against your configured floor. Either trigger fires. A 6-hour suppression window prevents the same alert from re-firing across cron ticks. A separate deal-quality score (0–100) combines discount-vs-list with proximity-to-all-time-low, so even targets without explicit thresholds auto-fire when the deal is exceptional.
4. The alert that lands
When something fires, you get an email + a Discord card. The card includes price, baseline, % off, the booking link (Google Flights / Google Hotels / merchant URL), and — for retail — per-store inventory if you've set a ZIP. Total time from the misprice landing on the retailer to your phone vibrating: usually under 2 minutes.
Why we don't bypass anti-bot defenses
Personal arbitrage tooling. We respect rate limits, identify our scrapers in User-Agent, and use authorized data feeds (SerpAPI, Best Buy Developer API) where direct fetches are blocked. If you've ever wondered why we're not faster on Walmart — that's why.