BuySignal

I got tired of opening 15 tabs every time I wanted to find a deal in the UK.

Currys. Argos. John Lewis. Google the product + "discount." Land on a comparison site full of ads. Close everything. Give up.

So I spent several months building [BuySignal](https://buysignal.co.uk) — an independent UK deals aggregator that monitors 140,000+ live deals daily across 20+ major retailers.

Here's what the process actually taught me.

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## The gap I found

Before building anything, I spent time researching what already existed:

- HotUKDeals — community-submitted, so coverage is inconsistent and skewed toward what members happen to notice

- CamelCamelCamel — Amazon only, no other retailers

- Google Shopping — buried in sponsored results, no deal-specific filtering

- Honey / Karma — work at checkout, don't show you what's on sale right now across the full market

None of them answered the simple question I had every morning: what are the best deals available in the UK today, across every major retailer, right now?

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## The technical problem nobody talks about

Building this required scraping, normalising, and categorising deal data from 20+ retailers — each with a completely different website structure, updated continuously.

A few things I didn't expect:

Price extraction is messier than it looks. Retailers structure their HTML differently. Some use JavaScript-rendered prices. Some show "Save £X" but bury the original price in a data attribute. I had one bug where a 50% discount caused the scraper to double the original price, because the save amount and the sale price were numerically identical, and the regex excluded the wrong value. Affected 27 products before I caught it.

Category classification at scale is genuinely hard. When you're pulling deals from 20+ retailers with different naming conventions, normalising "Ladies' Running Trainers" and "Women's Shoes" into the same category requires more logic than you'd think. I ended up building a universal patch system that handles hundreds of edge cases across brands.

The business model corrupts most competitors. Most price comparison sites take affiliate commissions — which creates an incentive to show you deals that pay better, not deals that save you more. I wanted to avoid that completely, so BuySignal charges a flat £2.99 for 30-day full access. No ads, no affiliate links.

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## What I learned about the UK deals market

Tracking prices continuously reveals patterns most shoppers never see:

- The best deals often appear quietly between major sale events — a Currys TV deal on a Tuesday morning can be genuinely better than anything during the official Black Friday window

- Fragrance discounts can reach 70–80% because the margin in perfume is enormous and retailers aggressively clear slow-moving stock

- Fashion moves fastest — a good deal can sell out within hours. (Fashion & Footwear alone is currently 130,000+ of our live deals)

- Tech discounts are smaller but more reliable — a 20% reduction on a laptop tends to hold for several days

None of this is visible unless you're watching the full market continuously.

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## Where it stands now

Live numbers as of today:

- 142,841 total deals tracked

- Fashion & Footwear: 130,805 deals

- Tech & Appliances: 9,491 deals

- Fragrance & Beauty: 2,545 deals

- 20+ major retailers: Currys, Argos, John Lewis, Very, JD Sports, Fragrance Direct, New Balance, and more

No registration required to browse. £2.99 for 30-day full access / £5 for individual price alerts.

Built on FastAPI + Python, served via nginx on a Linux VPS.

The assumption I built it on — that if you make the information genuinely transparent, people will pay a small amount for it — has proven correct so far.

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If you've ever opened fifteen tabs trying to find the best price on something in the UK, there's now a better way: [buysignal.co.uk](https://buysignal.co.uk)

Happy to answer questions about the scraping architecture, the business model, or anything else.

— József, founder of BuySignal