How PostThisDeal Lens works
Lens looks at what you show it, searches shops for that product or close alternatives, and shows what it found and how sure it is. This page explains how those decisions are made, and where they stop.
How Lens works out what you want
A barcode is checked for a valid check digit, then searched as that product. A picture is read by an AI service, which describes the products it can see and any brand or model number it can read. It’s told never to name people, and never to guess a model number. Words are read by fixed rules, which pick out a budget and a preference.
The AI’s reading is shown to you as a reading, because it can be wrong. It decides what to search for. It never sets a price, a label, a stock status or the order of results.
How we label a result
Exact match: a shop’s own product feed states the barcode you scanned. Likely match: the title states the same brand and a model containing a digit, or it was found by searching your barcode. Similar: everything else. Cheaper alternative: similar, and lower than the best match. How alike pictures look, and how sure an AI is, can never raise a label.
How prices are compared
Only offers tied to your product as exact or likely can be called the best, and that always means the best among the offers we checked. Amounts are compared in whole cents and never across currencies. Shipping we weren’t told stays unknown, is never counted as zero, and an offer with unknown shipping never beats one whose full cost is known. Tax isn’t included. New and used or refurbished offers are kept apart.
Prices are as listed when we checked, and each shows when that was. Where we can, we also read the shop’s own page and let its number win. Amazon prices come only from Amazon’s own product API, and show the time they were fetched.
How the price record works
When a search ties offers to one product by a barcode or a brand and model, we note what each shop listed it for that day, and keep it for just over a year. We hold nothing about who searched. Under three days of records we say nothing. From three days we show the range. Only from ten records over seven days do we say a price is the lowest we’ve recorded, which still isn’t the lowest ever. These are prices shops listed, not prices anyone is guaranteed to have paid.
What decides the order
For a specific product: the strength of the match, then the lowest known full cost. For “something like this”, in home and fashion: results are grouped by kind of shop, and within a group the closest match comes first, then shops that specialise in the category, then the lower price. In Luxury Lens, where people come for the piece and not a bargain, a tie goes to specialist luxury shops and then the higher price. Commission, paid placement and votes are not inputs, and no shop can pay to be included.
Your board and the stylist
Complete my look or room starts from what you’re trying to do. We keep your piece as the anchor, read its colour and any brand we can actually see, and plan what goes with it. A brand suggests which shops to look in, never what you can spend, and your words always win: “under $100” keeps the look and changes the shops. We then search real shops for each piece, check them in code against your budget and anything you ruled out, and choose the combination that works together. When titles of Pinterest-indexed ideas are available through Google Images, the stylist can draw general principles from them; we don’t fetch or show those pictures, and they’re never evidence about a product. From there the board is yours: you add, move, size and remove pieces from what the shops listed, and the total adds up the listed prices on it. A piece with no listed price is left out of the total, and we say so. Delivery and tax aren’t included.
The stylist is an AI service that suggests ways to wear or arrange what’s on your board, from the listings’ titles and pictures. It’s told not to state a price, a saving, stock or a measurement, or to comment on your body, and answers are filtered for those before you see them. No filter catches everything. It can’t change prices, labels or the order of results. Saved boards stay in your browser, not on our site.
How a deal check works
When a picture claims a discount, an AI service reads the percentage and prices shown, and we also look for that very listing with Google Lens. From there fixed rules take over. We check whether the picture’s own numbers add up, then compare them with new listings we found in US dollars: the same product where a barcode or brand and model tie them to it, otherwise similar ones, labelled as a rough guide.
We never call a deal real or fake. A discount is measured against a price the seller chose, and we can’t see what anyone really paid. When we say a price is at or below the offers we checked, that only means every offer we found for the same product cost the same or more. We don’t name a brand from how something looks, because many products copy a design, except in Luxury Lens, where it’s offered as a suggestion and is never authentication.
How each Lens differs
Deal Lens looks at any shop we can reach for the very same product. Store Lens compares with big-box and warehouse shops. Home Lens looks only at furniture and home shops, from about $20. Style Lens looks at everyday fashion shops, from about $5 to $600, unless you ask for high end. Luxury Lens looks only at high-end fashion sites and specialist resale, from about $300 new and $150 pre-owned. Tech Lens looks at electronics shops and major retailers, from about $10. These limits decide where a Lens looks. They say nothing about what any shop is worth, and they mean a cheaper offer can exist somewhere a Lens doesn’t look.
What we leave out
Pages that aren’t selling anything: articles, galleries and stock photos. Print-on-demand and custom-printing shops, samples, templates and wholesale lots unless you asked for them, and prices far below the others, which usually mean a sample or a bulk rate. Listings that describe themselves as replicas or copies.
What Lens can’t tell you
It can’t tell you that nothing cheaper exists, only what the shops we checked show. It can’t authenticate a designer item from a picture. It doesn’t know what’s on a store’s shelf or what your local branch charges. It doesn’t guess specifications, sizes, or whether something will fit or work with what you own. Its price record starts the first time a product is searched, leaves out Amazon, and is short for most products, so it never calls a price the lowest ever.
Your picture and your words
Pictures are made smaller in your browser, which also removes metadata such as where a photo was taken. They’re then sent to the services that run the search: an AI vision service (Anthropic’s Claude when it’s set up, otherwise Google Gemini or OpenAI), SerpApi with Google Lens, and our own picture-matching service if it’s switched on. We don’t store your picture on our site. A search is kept for about nine minutes and then forgotten. Please avoid pictures with private information.
How we make money
We may earn a commission when you buy through links on these pages, at no extra cost to you. Commission differs between shops and products, and it isn’t used anywhere in choosing or ordering results.
Last updated November 6, 2026.