A lot of shopping is a waiting game. You see something you like, then negotiate in your head whether to buy it now or wait for it to go on sale. There’s risk on both sides: If and when the price drops, your size or preferred color might not be available. But it’s so frustrating to see something you’ve bought for full price discounted just days after you made your purchase.

Paribus is a startup in our current class that allows you to make the online purchases you want, when you want, without worrying about comparison shopping or price drops.

Business Insider’s Jillian D’Onfro detailed how Paribus works in a story published last week:

“Paribus takes advantage of the fact that many of stores vow to refund
customers the difference if their competitors offer the same product
for cheaper or if they introduce their own additional discount not long
after the initial purchase.

There are two barriers to people actually ever getting any money back
though: Every store has a different specific policy, often buried deep
within the fine print on their websites, and most people don’t want to
go through the hassle of keeping tabs on dropping or competitor prices,
much less painstakingly contacting the company in question.

…[Paribus] users sign up with any email address that they plan to use for most
of their online purchases. Every time a receipt hits their inbox, Paribus scrapes the product
information and will spend several weeks poking around for potential
discounts. If it finds one, the shopper will get a refund.”

Paribus debuted its app in beta in May 2015, and currently has more than 15,000 users.

You can read more about Paribus in Business Insider here, and in TechCrunch here.