21 ms·

Geizhals – Tech Product Price Comparison and Tracking

296 points by schleck8 5y ago

rurban 5y ago
Proudly made with perl
corty 5y ago
From their job offers page for a sysadmin/devops position: > Angaben gemäß GlBG: Das KV-Mindestgrundgehalt für diese Position beträgt € 3,501 brutto monatlich (IT-Kollektivvertrag 2021, ST1 Erfahrungsstufe, Vollzeit = 38,5h), es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung. Seems they are even more stingy than their customers...
- hrnn 5y ago
  Seems based in Austria (surprised to see it here, I thought it was local only). Minimum salary as per collective agreement must be displayed on the job listing, but for skilled workers it's a mere reference. I asked 40% more than what was advertised for my current job and got it.
  - invalidusernam3 5y ago
    Also doesn't Austria do do that thing where employees get paid 14 times a year instead of the normal 12?
    - gehatare 5y ago
      Yes, you get the monthly salary 14 times, the last two are taxed at lower rates.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nxpnsv 5y ago
    Yup, you certainly can argue for more…
- c0l0 5y ago
  I used to work there as Senior Sysadmin for several years. My pay was competitive with most offerings the Austrian IT market can be brought to bear.
  - boshomi 5y ago
    "Mad Wuzzler Skills" required? (Wuzzler means table soccer in Austria.)
    - c0l0 5y ago
      We had great wuzzler culture there (with a former semi-pro on the tech team back then), which eventually prompted me to ask them to introduce that "requirement"/nice-to-have to the job ads. Nice to see they still list it! ;)
  - 4ad 5y ago
    That being said, competitive for Austria is low even compared to western Europe, and of course unfathomably lower than the US.
    - lazyjones 5y ago
      Austria has had both male and female world champions a few years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_table_football_champions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_table_football_c... There's 3 different popular table "systems" I have seen: Garlando, Leonhart and Tornado. In Austria, Garlando is used almost exclusively (except active competitive players who need to know all of them), therefore Austrians aren't as good at Tornado/Leonhart typically.
- ginko 5y ago
  It's an Austrian law thing. They have to list a salary so essentially all job offers show the legal Kollektivvertrag minimum salary which is obviously way too little. They then add "es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung" saying they're willing to pay more than that. So essentially just ignore the salaries in Austrian job offers.
  - cehrlich 5y ago
    Just out of curiosity, how do typical ‘real’ dev salaries in Austria compare to KV values? What is a reasonable expectation for Junior, Senior, etc.?
    - the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
      In actual IT companies entry salaries for a developer these days is around 70k.
    - bootloop 5y ago
      Any number mentioned is going to be wrong. It heavily depends on the area the business is operating in, the size of the company, the work you have to do and the location you are based (Vienna/city vs country side). Vienna is very competitive so salery can exceed KV quite a bit. Even for entry positions. On the country side it will depend but usually not much more. But costs of living (especially housing) are also lower.
- the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
  Minimum salaries have to be quoted by law in Austria. Actual salaries are not disclosed. We're also only quoting the legal minimum we have to.
schleck8 5y ago
This and Idealo are what I use to track prices for products I don't need urgently, like harddrives, to get notified when the overall market price drops or a sale goes live what i find really interesting is the 'search subscription' where you can filter products to your liking and then track the search as a whole. i only discovered that today so we'll see how it goes. the filters worked well for sure
- moepstar 5y ago
  It works pretty well from my experience, however the following caveats apply: - maximum reminder period is 6 months - if your price target is not met, no reminder - no, not even if your reminder period is up - no reminder to prolong - i'd say about 30-50% of the time, if you happen to read the mail hours later, the price is already up again Aside from potentially getting good deals it also saves one from impulse buys and sometimes i even got a surprise reminder i completely forgot setting..
mqus 5y ago
I always go there not only when I need a cheap vendor, but especially when I don't know exactly what exists on the market because they have such a superior index and filter for finding the product you search for. Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first. Idealo is somewhat fine in terms of capabilities but I think the geizhals UI is far superior.
- sdze 5y ago
  Plus GH does not nag you about being a robot and please solve captchas like crazy when I am behind corporate VPN...
- ganomi 5y ago
  I usually do that as well. But sometimes the properties of a product are not maintained correctly and you might miss out on certain manufacturers completely. Last time this happened to me was when looking for a new TV. Sony was completely filtered out although some of their TVs had all the features i was looking for. TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.
- brnt 5y ago
  I use a local equivalent (Tweakers Pricewatch). I've been using this since what feels like the late 90ies, and like you, I never quite saw the appeal of Amazon. I've been buying online since the 90ies, and that experience is still the same. Amazon, or any other 'marketplace', has not improved on that. Their selection is of course wider, but it's just unpleasant and a huge time sink every time. But even that a local competitor (bol.com) does better.
  - smartbit 5y ago
    GH is a different realm than tweakers.net, the number of many product attributes GH tracks and allow you to filter for is 10 fold of Tweakers.
marban 5y ago
Why is this HN-worthy? It's been around since the late 90s and not only for tech stuff but down to a box of cereal bars.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  I use them for tech parts but hadn't even occured to me to check for things like that there. Ironically your comment asking how this is HN-worthy is what's making this submission useful for me.
- MandieD 5y ago
  Despite living in Germany these past 15+ years, I was barely aware of them…
  - lamnk 5y ago
    Could be. As far as i can tell they do not market themselves, word of mouth only work so far within their (German?) tech savvy audience. I was a student in Germany since 2003 and use Geizhals extensively for purchasing stuff, especially computer related stuff. Other price comparison engines like Idealo, Kelkoo etc. suck in compare to Geizhals.
  - lazyjones 5y ago
    Geizhals had a rough stance in Germany. Despite being very early on the market, it used the .at TLD (and later geizhals.cc and geizhals.net) because it was impossible to acquire the .de domain. It was later bought by a competitor who turned his deals website into a price comparison (geizkragen.de), which caused much confusion among german users. Eventually, Geizhals bought the domain (along with the .com, which it had gone to WIPO over and lost - https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d2005-0121.html https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d200... ), for a (AFAIK) record-setting 7-figure price for a .de domain. Said competitor went on to build bitcoin.de and was very successful with it.
- getlawgdon 5y ago
  How is it not HN worthy? A review of the comments indicates some love and appreciation for a company apparently doing many things right. The implication brings contrast to Amazon and others. It's a case study. I think it's exactly what belongs here.
Fnoord 5y ago
A very good (and proven/old) price comparison tracker from before Web 2.0. I find it a bit cumbersome to figure shops who deliver to my country (NL) but if you're in German-speaking Europe this is AFAIK (still) the go-to. In The Netherlands, we got Tweakers Pricewatch.
formerly_proven 5y ago
Geizhals is basically the opposite of modern advertising: Provides a very useful service to the customer but only costs the advertising party something for successful conversions. And it basically does not need any tracking beyond the outbound links associating a transaction with them.
k__ 5y ago
I use their service since 2003, I think. Usually they list the best offers, and if not it's at least a good starting point.
oezi 5y ago
Lifehack: If you visit a store from Geizhals you get a better price in many cases than if you browse the store directly.
- moepstar 5y ago
  Can you share an example where that is the case? From what i figured in the past, they want you to believe that is the case as they earn their affiliate commission from you clicking through - however, years of ordering hardware especially avoiding to click and going the "extra mile" of going manually to the respective website and searching for the product there yielded exactly the same price as advertised on Geizhals.
  - caeruleus 5y ago
    One shop that I noticed was doing this is csv-direct.de. First visit a product page, e. g.: https://www.csv-direct.de/artinfo.php?artnr=AGX1428619&KATEGORIE=2721 https://www.csv-direct.de/artinfo.php?artnr=AGX1428619&KATEG... (758,93€) then look at the geizhals price: https://geizhals.de/ubiquiti-unifiswitch-enterprise-24-rackmount-gigabit-managed-switch-usw-enterprise-24-poe-a2573745.html#offerlist https://geizhals.de/ubiquiti-unifiswitch-enterprise-24-rackm... (748,09€) After you have visited the page from geizhals, the lower price will stay even on direct links, for that product only (until you clear local data/cookies).
    - moepstar 5y ago
      That's interesting and you're right. Never happend upon this behavior until now. Incidentally, i've bought RAM from CSV-direct sometime last year, after getting an alert from Geizhals... not sure if i clicked through with the link from the email, the price however did match...
      - caeruleus 5y ago
        Haha, actually the reason I noticed was because I was shopping for RAM at the beginning of this year. The product above was just my first random thought, it seems to be very regular there. FWIW, it's enough to just set the parameter &pva=geizhals2 in the GET request for the product page once. Could be fun to see how regular it is.
arendtio 5y ago
I like their index, as it helps me to find alternative products, but aside from tech products is isn't as complete as I would like to have it. Do you know of any similar pages, maybe for the US or other countries?
- schleck8 5y ago
  idealo is similar (available in italy, france and spain additionally to DACH), someone mentioned kakaku for japan
- TicklishTiger 5y ago
  There is Product Chart [1], a site by a HN user. But I think it has the focus more on the user interface than on a broad product index. [1] https://www.productchart.com https://www.productchart.com
- bjornsing 5y ago
  Prisjakt[1] is the Scandinavian version I guess. 1. https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.no https://prisjakt.no https://pricespy.co.uk https://pricespy.co.uk etc
- esel2k 5y ago
  For Switzerland I go to http://www.toppreise.ch http://www.toppreise.ch Edited: Url to be clickable
  - h0nd 5y ago
    Lovin' it
ysleepy 5y ago
My main shopping site. Proof that UX and "pretty" aren't always the same, this page has the best experience by a mile. You know there is a lot of optimization in the background for all the faceting and search, I'd be really interested how they implemented that. A lot of the value also comes from meticulously integrating shop product datasets either by scraping or cooperating, combining offers etc. Disruptive by putting in the hard work and keeping at it.
softgrow 5y ago
Looks pretty much like a clone of https://kakaku.com https://kakaku.com (Japanese language). Doesn't seem to have the nice price history graphs or the multi factor ratings. Compare 2.5" SSD https://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec102=2&lid=20190108pricemenu_parts1 https://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec102=2&lid=20... vs https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=4832_1~4836_2 https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=4832_1~4836_2
- ysleepy 5y ago
  Geizhals is at it since 1997 and tables with a product image at the left is hardly something distinguishing.
- schleck8 5y ago
  1. It does have a pricy history, including markers for events like black friday, the first and last price as well as the median 2. You can sort the geizhals results by user ratings and it also displays review scores on the desktop version/mobile details page 3. Kakaku was established a year after Geizhals, according to their wiki entries and domain registry
eulenteufel 5y ago
The website respects DNT and informs the user with a small popup that disappears automatically. What a joy! The web could be such a nice place if it was like this everywhere.
solarkraft 5y ago
It’s pretty amazing. I think they could be much more popular with a little advertising and a bit of restyling.
- fklp120 5y ago
  Restyling does not improve the site in most cases. This UI is functional and works. Also, it gets way less on my nerves than the uniform flat style glitzy nonsense. chess24.com is another example. A traditional UI that appears quirky in the beginning but is superior once you get used to it. Many restylings replace something individual and special with bland uniformity. Just Like TV makeover shows.
mlang23 5y ago
Hehe, this sites exists since, well, a loooong time. I typically use it as a directory, to know whats available in a certain category. But I really wonder how this site made it onto the frontpage. This is a bit like posting "amazon.com" :-)
- marban 5y ago
  Got downflamed for stating this below so you have my + ;)
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  I guess it's popular because people outside of Germany didn't know there is a better product search than amazon.com. And if we honestly compare the two, Geizhals beats Amazon in almost every regard, from better filters to less tracking...
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Pretty much anything is better than Amazon's search.
  - mlang23 5y ago
    Well, I am "outside of Germany" and I know the site since at least 15 years. May I remind you that europe consists of more countries then just Germany?
step21 5y ago
You can also use them via heise.de/preisvergleich and thus also supporting good tech journalism.
- schleck8 5y ago
  they are part of the heise group, so heise profits either way i reckon
66fm472tjy7 5y ago
One of their most impressive features is how many product attributes they track and allow you to filter for. E.g. for mainboards you can filter for support for all generations of Ryzen CPU + at least M.2 slots + BIOS flashback (allows you to do BIOS updates without a CPU or RAM) + at least one USB-C + built in IO shield + at least 12 VRM phases + WiFi 6 + in stock: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu&sort=t&bl1_id=30&xf=11524_1%7E11924_2%7E13067_USB+BIOS+Flashback+(extern)%7E16791_R1000X%7E16791_R2000X%7E16791_R3000X%7E16791_R5000X%7E17868_12%7E494_I%2FO-Blende+integriert%7E7226_802.11ax https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&h...
- baybal2 5y ago
  In Russia, there is Yandex Market, they have almost the same, if not better granularity, and they don't use any scraping to generate product data — all human filled
- n1000 5y ago
  My favourite feature is sorting by price per GB
- GordonS 5y ago
  This is something that drives me nuts about Amazon, who are a giant that has the resources to do it properly - but don't. Their filters are usually useless, filtering out matching production, and including products that don't even match from their title.
  - josefx 5y ago
    Not sure if that is a problem with Amazons search or the product listings themselves. Last time I was looking for a motherboard on Amazon it seemed as if half couldn't decide whether they had an AMD or Intel CPU socket. The descriptions, technical details and serial numbers where all over the place. Apparently the process of putting up thousands of products on Amazon is fairly automated and there are exactly zero humans checking if the result makes any sense.
- zmix 5y ago
onede 5y ago
my secret tip is schottenland.de respectively hardwareschotte.de they’re on the market for a long time as well, they do have many many filters. kind of an underdog with much expertise.
- schleck8 5y ago
  thanks for the tip, looks good
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
While that can be good for getting an overview of what's available on the market, it can also lead to frustration. For instance searching for RAM, mainboard, etc., then going to the site of the product just to discover there is already a new, (supposedly) better edition available, but nobody is stocking that, or willing to do so. Depending on your view it gives a distorted view of what is available, compared to what could be available. Imagine they'd get their list directly from the OEMs, and show how lagging the merchants are. Like a visualization of the supply-chain, the capacity of the channel, and how lagging and incomplete the merchants are. Like a diff-view between what is available at the source, how it moves into the channel(s), an when it is available for you (if at all!) I guess it depends on what is being tested by the countless hardware review sites, and what's known to the people. Whereas I, scroogy as usual, from time to time have to source several dozen to about a hundred low-end systems, and prefer to get stuff from the "also runs" like [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitegroup_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitegroup_Computer_Systems […] https://www.ecs.com.tw/en https://www.ecs.com.tw/en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostar […] https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/ https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik […] https://www.goodram.com/en/ https://www.goodram.com/en/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend_Information […] https://transcend-info.com/ https://transcend-info.com/ to run some form of Linux or BSD on it, for light office or remote desktop use. Ghastly BIOS? Doesn't matter, is only used once during initial setup, and then after updates, if necessary. No gaming Bling-Bling? Matters even less, since it has no useful function and is disabled, if it's there at all. Bad VRMs or cooling of these? Does it matter when I don't overclock? I'm doing this since about 15 years this way, and had no stress with this choices, at all. All I did was checking the installation manual pdf of the mainboard for fan connectors, and choose them accordingly. I'm too old-fashioned, I guess? Anyway, enough of a rant. Geizhals is the best we have, but it could be much better! And thumbs-up for no-frills look&feel without dumbing it down!
HippoBaro 5y ago
I’ve been using this for years and it’s been extremely useful. The feature to plot the prices over time is great to gauge whether it’s a good time to buy something or if you’d rather wait.
forrestgumbc 5y ago
We're building something similar for ANY product at www.chestr.app Our beta just opened so feel free to check it out :) [We also just applied to YC W22 so fingers crossed!]
- schleck8 5y ago
  you definitely need a privacy policy for what the extension does going to www.chestr.app doesn't work, only chestr.app does
- mqus 5y ago
  similar? no. At its base, geizhals is a database where much effort went into data quality. Chestr seems(to me) to be another social media site but focused on shopping. Simple comparison (from the demo video): GH/Chestr Comparing prices:yes/no Filtering/sorting for a multitude of attributes:yes/no Social component:no(at most a rating/review)/yes Needs an account:no/yes Focusing on information over feelings:yes/no manually maintained entries:yes(at least I assume so, no one comes close)/no Getting a handle on everything that exists for a type of product:yes/no Inclusion of past prices:yes/no To me, chestr is basically worthless. I don't care what others bought when I'm searching for something. What fits for them doesn't have to fit for me. I'm not starting from a specific shopping site but from the products itself, and then search for the perfect (price, reviews) shopping site. For that matter, this seems like a great site for influencers and their audience. I very much doubt that the data quality required for building something like geizhals can be achieved in a "hack it together" startup context.
m3nu 5y ago
Is there something comparable for the US market? I sometimes drop ship hard drives to my colo partners, but didn't find good comparison sites.
- schleck8 5y ago
  someone said PCPartpicker
bildung 5y ago
A really wonderful site, great filters, great price tracking. The only thing I'd wish for would be the ability to exclude all those amazon.com shops from the results (everyone from amazons marketplace seems to be listed as a distinct shop there).
- Tepix 5y ago
  I agree, they are fantastic and i've used them for the last 16 years or so. Their product database is unmatched and many of my suggestions have been kindly accepted and implemented. The only feature that's missing is a toggle that will show you all their products in the product database including those with no offers. Right now you will only find them when you search for their names but you can't list all 5k (5120x2880) monitors for example, only the very few models that are still being sold today.
kevindong 5y ago
Seems like a EU-centric version of PCPartPicker but with a much broader array of products that it tracks. https://pcpartpicker.com https://pcpartpicker.com
AegirLeet 5y ago
Love that site. The filters are amazing.
jh00ker 5y ago
https://www.camelcamelcamel.com https://www.camelcamelcamel.com works really well against Amazon products. There is also a 3rd-party tracking component, but it seems to mainly focus on Amazon prices.
deltron3030 5y ago
Build quite a few computers in the past based on their useful wishlist feature. You can aggregate the parts you need and then find the best offers for all parts within a single shipment, or shipments from different sellers when something is unavailable or cheaper elsewhere. Not sure about the UX though, it's nice to use if you more or less know what you want and need, to find the cheapest thing within a category or based on required specs and features.
franze 5y ago
Yeah, main office is in Vienna and they are the major Perl employers in this area. Perl, all the way down. Also the CTO was the first one who brought webperformance (meetups) into our community 10+ years ago.
tarr11 5y ago
Surprised to see rtx 3080s. Where are people buying RTX 3080 graphics cards these days? All the prices I see (USA) are either 2500+ or out of stock.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  For what is worth, when I got my 3070 earlier this year this gpu-specific site[0] was even more helpful than geizhals as they'd only list a couple at a time at okay prices and this seemed to update quicker. Checking it now there are no 3080s actually avaible. 0. https://www.gputracker.eu/en https://www.gputracker.eu/en
vmp 5y ago
I made a web-extension to add PassMark benchmark results to processors and mainboards with embedded CPUs to allow you to compare the best price per performance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sharkys-geizhals-erweiterung/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sharkys-geizh... It really helped me make some decent budget builds. Tried to publish it to the chrome extension store as well but they removed it. Honestly just use Firefox, google is garbage.
longstation 5y ago
Does any one know if there's a North American equivalent?
- lazyjones 5y ago
  pricewatch.com was the original inspiration for this website and pricegrabber.com was (apparently until some years ago) a close equivalent for many years. Both have changed dramatically though.
hesk 5y ago
How does geizhals compare to idealo?
- lazyjones 5y ago
  Geizhals is much older, was mostly focused on IT/electronics for many years and is thus strongest in these categories. Idealo is broader (due to its much larger team/company) but sometimes lacking detail where Geizhals is good, and vice-versa. Geizhals also covers the Austrian market better while Idealo is stronger in Germany.
  - hesk 5y ago
    Thanks!
lazyjones 5y ago
Funny that this is trending for the first time on HN after all these years. FWIW, I was the original founder and developer. This started as a Perl script crawling 8 local merchants' price lists and writing a single HTML file (some time in 1997), then turned into a CGI script reading flat text files (i.e. no database), then into a mod_perl handler. No complete rewrites at least until 2014 when I left the company. Perl got really unwieldy at some point, would not recommend (and my code was universally hated I guess). By the way, geizhals.at (the original domain) was in the top 2000 Alexa websites for a few years (somewhere around the years 2000-2004) AFAIR despite being from a very small country.
- jahnu 5y ago
  I guess those first merchants included Academia and... I think one out Hietzing if I remember correctly. Still one of the best sites on the internet. Kudos!
  - lazyjones 5y ago
    I don't remember all 8, but NRE, Krob, Plug, Birg, Actron, Academia were among them AFAIR. The earliest archive.org has proof for can be seen in the dropdown here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990508145612/http://www.geizhals.at/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990508145612/http://www.geizha...
- schleck8 5y ago
  thanks for the insights!
Aerroon 5y ago
I really like Geizhals. It provides a way better UX than Amazon for browsing computer hardware and other electronics. My only gripe with it is how many stores only sell to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I know that it's not geizhals' fault. Because of this, it's mostly an improved way to search Amazon for me. It's a bit funny that if I were in a richer country, where people are paid more, the price of commuter hardware would be cheaper.
codethief 5y ago
Wow, I didn't know this site still existed! I seem to remember that ~15 years ago it regularly showed up in Google search results but it doesn't anymore. I'm wondering what happened – did they stop spending a ton of money on Adwords?
- lazyjones 5y ago
  The .eu domain was never really pushed, it's been using NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW for many years to avoid duplicated content penalties from Google and double crawling. The .at/.de domains should still be very visible in Google, at least they were a few years ago when I checked regularly (I use Duckduckgo exclusively).
reirob 5y ago
Finally a website where i can filter for criteria I need, down to stuff like keyboard without number block, with Trackpoint (on the site it's called pointing stick). No other site i know does this, not even the vendors themselves.
butonic 5y ago
Please don't think they crawl the web. The shops listed on their page send them detailed catalogs in XML. It's a mess. To my knowledge this is how it is done at geizhals, idealo and even google.

296 points by schleck8 5y ago

Proudly made with perl

From their job offers page for a sysadmin/devops position: > Angaben gemäß GlBG: Das KV-Mindestgrundgehalt für diese Position beträgt € 3,501 brutto monatlich (IT-Kollektivvertrag 2021, ST1 Erfahrungsstufe, Vollzeit = 38,5h), es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung. Seems they are even more stingy than their customers...

hrnn 5y ago
Seems based in Austria (surprised to see it here, I thought it was local only). Minimum salary as per collective agreement must be displayed on the job listing, but for skilled workers it's a mere reference. I asked 40% more than what was advertised for my current job and got it.
- invalidusernam3 5y ago
  Also doesn't Austria do do that thing where employees get paid 14 times a year instead of the normal 12?
  - gehatare 5y ago
    Yes, you get the monthly salary 14 times, the last two are taxed at lower rates.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nxpnsv 5y ago
  Yup, you certainly can argue for more…
c0l0 5y ago
I used to work there as Senior Sysadmin for several years. My pay was competitive with most offerings the Austrian IT market can be brought to bear.
- boshomi 5y ago
  "Mad Wuzzler Skills" required? (Wuzzler means table soccer in Austria.)
  - c0l0 5y ago
    We had great wuzzler culture there (with a former semi-pro on the tech team back then), which eventually prompted me to ask them to introduce that "requirement"/nice-to-have to the job ads. Nice to see they still list it! ;)
- 4ad 5y ago
  That being said, competitive for Austria is low even compared to western Europe, and of course unfathomably lower than the US.
  - lazyjones 5y ago
    Austria has had both male and female world champions a few years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_table_football_champions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_table_football_c... There's 3 different popular table "systems" I have seen: Garlando, Leonhart and Tornado. In Austria, Garlando is used almost exclusively (except active competitive players who need to know all of them), therefore Austrians aren't as good at Tornado/Leonhart typically.
ginko 5y ago
It's an Austrian law thing. They have to list a salary so essentially all job offers show the legal Kollektivvertrag minimum salary which is obviously way too little. They then add "es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung" saying they're willing to pay more than that. So essentially just ignore the salaries in Austrian job offers.
- cehrlich 5y ago
  Just out of curiosity, how do typical ‘real’ dev salaries in Austria compare to KV values? What is a reasonable expectation for Junior, Senior, etc.?
  - the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
    In actual IT companies entry salaries for a developer these days is around 70k.
  - bootloop 5y ago
    Any number mentioned is going to be wrong. It heavily depends on the area the business is operating in, the size of the company, the work you have to do and the location you are based (Vienna/city vs country side). Vienna is very competitive so salery can exceed KV quite a bit. Even for entry positions. On the country side it will depend but usually not much more. But costs of living (especially housing) are also lower.
the_mitsuhiko 5y ago
Minimum salaries have to be quoted by law in Austria. Actual salaries are not disclosed. We're also only quoting the legal minimum we have to.

schleck8 5y ago

This and Idealo are what I use to track prices for products I don't need urgently, like harddrives, to get notified when the overall market price drops or a sale goes live what i find really interesting is the 'search subscription' where you can filter products to your liking and then track the search as a whole. i only discovered that today so we'll see how it goes. the filters worked well for sure

moepstar 5y ago
It works pretty well from my experience, however the following caveats apply: - maximum reminder period is 6 months - if your price target is not met, no reminder - no, not even if your reminder period is up - no reminder to prolong - i'd say about 30-50% of the time, if you happen to read the mail hours later, the price is already up again Aside from potentially getting good deals it also saves one from impulse buys and sometimes i even got a surprise reminder i completely forgot setting..

mqus 5y ago

I always go there not only when I need a cheap vendor, but especially when I don't know exactly what exists on the market because they have such a superior index and filter for finding the product you search for. Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first. Idealo is somewhat fine in terms of capabilities but I think the geizhals UI is far superior.

sdze 5y ago
Plus GH does not nag you about being a robot and please solve captchas like crazy when I am behind corporate VPN...
ganomi 5y ago
I usually do that as well. But sometimes the properties of a product are not maintained correctly and you might miss out on certain manufacturers completely. Last time this happened to me was when looking for a new TV. Sony was completely filtered out although some of their TVs had all the features i was looking for. TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.
brnt 5y ago
I use a local equivalent (Tweakers Pricewatch). I've been using this since what feels like the late 90ies, and like you, I never quite saw the appeal of Amazon. I've been buying online since the 90ies, and that experience is still the same. Amazon, or any other 'marketplace', has not improved on that. Their selection is of course wider, but it's just unpleasant and a huge time sink every time. But even that a local competitor (bol.com) does better.
- smartbit 5y ago
  GH is a different realm than tweakers.net, the number of many product attributes GH tracks and allow you to filter for is 10 fold of Tweakers.

marban 5y ago

Why is this HN-worthy? It's been around since the late 90s and not only for tech stuff but down to a box of cereal bars.

Tenoke 5y ago
I use them for tech parts but hadn't even occured to me to check for things like that there. Ironically your comment asking how this is HN-worthy is what's making this submission useful for me.
MandieD 5y ago
Despite living in Germany these past 15+ years, I was barely aware of them…
- lamnk 5y ago
  Could be. As far as i can tell they do not market themselves, word of mouth only work so far within their (German?) tech savvy audience. I was a student in Germany since 2003 and use Geizhals extensively for purchasing stuff, especially computer related stuff. Other price comparison engines like Idealo, Kelkoo etc. suck in compare to Geizhals.
- lazyjones 5y ago
  Geizhals had a rough stance in Germany. Despite being very early on the market, it used the .at TLD (and later geizhals.cc and geizhals.net) because it was impossible to acquire the .de domain. It was later bought by a competitor who turned his deals website into a price comparison (geizkragen.de), which caused much confusion among german users. Eventually, Geizhals bought the domain (along with the .com, which it had gone to WIPO over and lost - https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d2005-0121.html https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d200... ), for a (AFAIK) record-setting 7-figure price for a .de domain. Said competitor went on to build bitcoin.de and was very successful with it.
getlawgdon 5y ago
How is it not HN worthy? A review of the comments indicates some love and appreciation for a company apparently doing many things right. The implication brings contrast to Amazon and others. It's a case study. I think it's exactly what belongs here.

Fnoord 5y ago

A very good (and proven/old) price comparison tracker from before Web 2.0. I find it a bit cumbersome to figure shops who deliver to my country (NL) but if you're in German-speaking Europe this is AFAIK (still) the go-to. In The Netherlands, we got Tweakers Pricewatch.

formerly_proven 5y ago

Geizhals is basically the opposite of modern advertising: Provides a very useful service to the customer but only costs the advertising party something for successful conversions. And it basically does not need any tracking beyond the outbound links associating a transaction with them.

k__ 5y ago

I use their service since 2003, I think. Usually they list the best offers, and if not it's at least a good starting point.

oezi 5y ago

Lifehack: If you visit a store from Geizhals you get a better price in many cases than if you browse the store directly.

moepstar 5y ago
Can you share an example where that is the case? From what i figured in the past, they want you to believe that is the case as they earn their affiliate commission from you clicking through - however, years of ordering hardware especially avoiding to click and going the "extra mile" of going manually to the respective website and searching for the product there yielded exactly the same price as advertised on Geizhals.
- caeruleus 5y ago
  One shop that I noticed was doing this is csv-direct.de. First visit a product page, e. g.: https://www.csv-direct.de/artinfo.php?artnr=AGX1428619&KATEGORIE=2721 https://www.csv-direct.de/artinfo.php?artnr=AGX1428619&KATEG... (758,93€) then look at the geizhals price: https://geizhals.de/ubiquiti-unifiswitch-enterprise-24-rackmount-gigabit-managed-switch-usw-enterprise-24-poe-a2573745.html#offerlist https://geizhals.de/ubiquiti-unifiswitch-enterprise-24-rackm... (748,09€) After you have visited the page from geizhals, the lower price will stay even on direct links, for that product only (until you clear local data/cookies).
  - moepstar 5y ago
    That's interesting and you're right. Never happend upon this behavior until now. Incidentally, i've bought RAM from CSV-direct sometime last year, after getting an alert from Geizhals... not sure if i clicked through with the link from the email, the price however did match...
    - caeruleus 5y ago
      Haha, actually the reason I noticed was because I was shopping for RAM at the beginning of this year. The product above was just my first random thought, it seems to be very regular there. FWIW, it's enough to just set the parameter &pva=geizhals2 in the GET request for the product page once. Could be fun to see how regular it is.

arendtio 5y ago

I like their index, as it helps me to find alternative products, but aside from tech products is isn't as complete as I would like to have it. Do you know of any similar pages, maybe for the US or other countries?

schleck8 5y ago
idealo is similar (available in italy, france and spain additionally to DACH), someone mentioned kakaku for japan
TicklishTiger 5y ago
There is Product Chart [1], a site by a HN user. But I think it has the focus more on the user interface than on a broad product index. [1] https://www.productchart.com https://www.productchart.com
bjornsing 5y ago
Prisjakt[1] is the Scandinavian version I guess. 1. https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.no https://prisjakt.no https://pricespy.co.uk https://pricespy.co.uk etc
esel2k 5y ago
For Switzerland I go to http://www.toppreise.ch http://www.toppreise.ch Edited: Url to be clickable
- h0nd 5y ago
  Lovin' it

ysleepy 5y ago

My main shopping site. Proof that UX and "pretty" aren't always the same, this page has the best experience by a mile. You know there is a lot of optimization in the background for all the faceting and search, I'd be really interested how they implemented that. A lot of the value also comes from meticulously integrating shop product datasets either by scraping or cooperating, combining offers etc. Disruptive by putting in the hard work and keeping at it.

softgrow 5y ago

Looks pretty much like a clone of https://kakaku.com https://kakaku.com (Japanese language). Doesn't seem to have the nice price history graphs or the multi factor ratings. Compare 2.5" SSD https://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec102=2&lid=20190108pricemenu_parts1 https://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec102=2&lid=20... vs https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=4832_1~4836_2 https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=4832_1~4836_2

ysleepy 5y ago
Geizhals is at it since 1997 and tables with a product image at the left is hardly something distinguishing.
schleck8 5y ago
1. It does have a pricy history, including markers for events like black friday, the first and last price as well as the median 2. You can sort the geizhals results by user ratings and it also displays review scores on the desktop version/mobile details page 3. Kakaku was established a year after Geizhals, according to their wiki entries and domain registry

eulenteufel 5y ago

The website respects DNT and informs the user with a small popup that disappears automatically. What a joy! The web could be such a nice place if it was like this everywhere.

solarkraft 5y ago

It’s pretty amazing. I think they could be much more popular with a little advertising and a bit of restyling.

fklp120 5y ago
Restyling does not improve the site in most cases. This UI is functional and works. Also, it gets way less on my nerves than the uniform flat style glitzy nonsense. chess24.com is another example. A traditional UI that appears quirky in the beginning but is superior once you get used to it. Many restylings replace something individual and special with bland uniformity. Just Like TV makeover shows.

mlang23 5y ago

Hehe, this sites exists since, well, a loooong time. I typically use it as a directory, to know whats available in a certain category. But I really wonder how this site made it onto the frontpage. This is a bit like posting "amazon.com" :-)

marban 5y ago
Got downflamed for stating this below so you have my + ;)
fxtentacle 5y ago
I guess it's popular because people outside of Germany didn't know there is a better product search than amazon.com. And if we honestly compare the two, Geizhals beats Amazon in almost every regard, from better filters to less tracking...
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Pretty much anything is better than Amazon's search.
- mlang23 5y ago
  Well, I am "outside of Germany" and I know the site since at least 15 years. May I remind you that europe consists of more countries then just Germany?

step21 5y ago

You can also use them via heise.de/preisvergleich and thus also supporting good tech journalism.

schleck8 5y ago
they are part of the heise group, so heise profits either way i reckon

66fm472tjy7 5y ago

One of their most impressive features is how many product attributes they track and allow you to filter for. E.g. for mainboards you can filter for support for all generations of Ryzen CPU + at least M.2 slots + BIOS flashback (allows you to do BIOS updates without a CPU or RAM) + at least one USB-C + built in IO shield + at least 12 VRM phases + WiFi 6 + in stock: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&hloc=uk&hloc=eu&sort=t&bl1_id=30&xf=11524_1%7E11924_2%7E13067_USB+BIOS+Flashback+(extern)%7E16791_R1000X%7E16791_R2000X%7E16791_R3000X%7E16791_R5000X%7E17868_12%7E494_I%2FO-Blende+integriert%7E7226_802.11ax https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&h...

baybal2 5y ago
In Russia, there is Yandex Market, they have almost the same, if not better granularity, and they don't use any scraping to generate product data — all human filled
n1000 5y ago
My favourite feature is sorting by price per GB
GordonS 5y ago
This is something that drives me nuts about Amazon, who are a giant that has the resources to do it properly - but don't. Their filters are usually useless, filtering out matching production, and including products that don't even match from their title.
- josefx 5y ago
  Not sure if that is a problem with Amazons search or the product listings themselves. Last time I was looking for a motherboard on Amazon it seemed as if half couldn't decide whether they had an AMD or Intel CPU socket. The descriptions, technical details and serial numbers where all over the place. Apparently the process of putting up thousands of products on Amazon is fairly automated and there are exactly zero humans checking if the result makes any sense.
zmix 5y ago

onede 5y ago

my secret tip is schottenland.de respectively hardwareschotte.de they’re on the market for a long time as well, they do have many many filters. kind of an underdog with much expertise.

schleck8 5y ago
thanks for the tip, looks good

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

While that can be good for getting an overview of what's available on the market, it can also lead to frustration. For instance searching for RAM, mainboard, etc., then going to the site of the product just to discover there is already a new, (supposedly) better edition available, but nobody is stocking that, or willing to do so. Depending on your view it gives a distorted view of what is available, compared to what could be available. Imagine they'd get their list directly from the OEMs, and show how lagging the merchants are. Like a visualization of the supply-chain, the capacity of the channel, and how lagging and incomplete the merchants are. Like a diff-view between what is available at the source, how it moves into the channel(s), an when it is available for you (if at all!) I guess it depends on what is being tested by the countless hardware review sites, and what's known to the people. Whereas I, scroogy as usual, from time to time have to source several dozen to about a hundred low-end systems, and prefer to get stuff from the "also runs" like [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitegroup_Computer_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitegroup_Computer_Systems […] https://www.ecs.com.tw/en https://www.ecs.com.tw/en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostar […] https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/ https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik […] https://www.goodram.com/en/ https://www.goodram.com/en/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend_Information […] https://transcend-info.com/ https://transcend-info.com/ to run some form of Linux or BSD on it, for light office or remote desktop use. Ghastly BIOS? Doesn't matter, is only used once during initial setup, and then after updates, if necessary. No gaming Bling-Bling? Matters even less, since it has no useful function and is disabled, if it's there at all. Bad VRMs or cooling of these? Does it matter when I don't overclock? I'm doing this since about 15 years this way, and had no stress with this choices, at all. All I did was checking the installation manual pdf of the mainboard for fan connectors, and choose them accordingly. I'm too old-fashioned, I guess? Anyway, enough of a rant. Geizhals is the best we have, but it could be much better! And thumbs-up for no-frills look&feel without dumbing it down!

HippoBaro 5y ago

I’ve been using this for years and it’s been extremely useful. The feature to plot the prices over time is great to gauge whether it’s a good time to buy something or if you’d rather wait.

forrestgumbc 5y ago

We're building something similar for ANY product at www.chestr.app Our beta just opened so feel free to check it out :) [We also just applied to YC W22 so fingers crossed!]

schleck8 5y ago
you definitely need a privacy policy for what the extension does going to www.chestr.app doesn't work, only chestr.app does
mqus 5y ago
similar? no. At its base, geizhals is a database where much effort went into data quality. Chestr seems(to me) to be another social media site but focused on shopping. Simple comparison (from the demo video): GH/Chestr Comparing prices:yes/no Filtering/sorting for a multitude of attributes:yes/no Social component:no(at most a rating/review)/yes Needs an account:no/yes Focusing on information over feelings:yes/no manually maintained entries:yes(at least I assume so, no one comes close)/no Getting a handle on everything that exists for a type of product:yes/no Inclusion of past prices:yes/no To me, chestr is basically worthless. I don't care what others bought when I'm searching for something. What fits for them doesn't have to fit for me. I'm not starting from a specific shopping site but from the products itself, and then search for the perfect (price, reviews) shopping site. For that matter, this seems like a great site for influencers and their audience. I very much doubt that the data quality required for building something like geizhals can be achieved in a "hack it together" startup context.

m3nu 5y ago

Is there something comparable for the US market? I sometimes drop ship hard drives to my colo partners, but didn't find good comparison sites.

schleck8 5y ago
someone said PCPartpicker

bildung 5y ago

A really wonderful site, great filters, great price tracking. The only thing I'd wish for would be the ability to exclude all those amazon.com shops from the results (everyone from amazons marketplace seems to be listed as a distinct shop there).

Tepix 5y ago
I agree, they are fantastic and i've used them for the last 16 years or so. Their product database is unmatched and many of my suggestions have been kindly accepted and implemented. The only feature that's missing is a toggle that will show you all their products in the product database including those with no offers. Right now you will only find them when you search for their names but you can't list all 5k (5120x2880) monitors for example, only the very few models that are still being sold today.

kevindong 5y ago

Seems like a EU-centric version of PCPartPicker but with a much broader array of products that it tracks. https://pcpartpicker.com https://pcpartpicker.com

AegirLeet 5y ago

Love that site. The filters are amazing.

jh00ker 5y ago

https://www.camelcamelcamel.com https://www.camelcamelcamel.com works really well against Amazon products. There is also a 3rd-party tracking component, but it seems to mainly focus on Amazon prices.

deltron3030 5y ago

Build quite a few computers in the past based on their useful wishlist feature. You can aggregate the parts you need and then find the best offers for all parts within a single shipment, or shipments from different sellers when something is unavailable or cheaper elsewhere. Not sure about the UX though, it's nice to use if you more or less know what you want and need, to find the cheapest thing within a category or based on required specs and features.

franze 5y ago

Yeah, main office is in Vienna and they are the major Perl employers in this area. Perl, all the way down. Also the CTO was the first one who brought webperformance (meetups) into our community 10+ years ago.

tarr11 5y ago

Surprised to see rtx 3080s. Where are people buying RTX 3080 graphics cards these days? All the prices I see (USA) are either 2500+ or out of stock.

Tenoke 5y ago
For what is worth, when I got my 3070 earlier this year this gpu-specific site[0] was even more helpful than geizhals as they'd only list a couple at a time at okay prices and this seemed to update quicker. Checking it now there are no 3080s actually avaible. 0. https://www.gputracker.eu/en https://www.gputracker.eu/en

vmp 5y ago

I made a web-extension to add PassMark benchmark results to processors and mainboards with embedded CPUs to allow you to compare the best price per performance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sharkys-geizhals-erweiterung/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sharkys-geizh... It really helped me make some decent budget builds. Tried to publish it to the chrome extension store as well but they removed it. Honestly just use Firefox, google is garbage.

longstation 5y ago

Does any one know if there's a North American equivalent?

lazyjones 5y ago
pricewatch.com was the original inspiration for this website and pricegrabber.com was (apparently until some years ago) a close equivalent for many years. Both have changed dramatically though.

hesk 5y ago

How does geizhals compare to idealo?

lazyjones 5y ago
Geizhals is much older, was mostly focused on IT/electronics for many years and is thus strongest in these categories. Idealo is broader (due to its much larger team/company) but sometimes lacking detail where Geizhals is good, and vice-versa. Geizhals also covers the Austrian market better while Idealo is stronger in Germany.
- hesk 5y ago
  Thanks!

lazyjones 5y ago

Funny that this is trending for the first time on HN after all these years. FWIW, I was the original founder and developer. This started as a Perl script crawling 8 local merchants' price lists and writing a single HTML file (some time in 1997), then turned into a CGI script reading flat text files (i.e. no database), then into a mod_perl handler. No complete rewrites at least until 2014 when I left the company. Perl got really unwieldy at some point, would not recommend (and my code was universally hated I guess). By the way, geizhals.at (the original domain) was in the top 2000 Alexa websites for a few years (somewhere around the years 2000-2004) AFAIR despite being from a very small country.

jahnu 5y ago
I guess those first merchants included Academia and... I think one out Hietzing if I remember correctly. Still one of the best sites on the internet. Kudos!
- lazyjones 5y ago
  I don't remember all 8, but NRE, Krob, Plug, Birg, Actron, Academia were among them AFAIR. The earliest archive.org has proof for can be seen in the dropdown here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990508145612/http://www.geizhals.at/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990508145612/http://www.geizha...
schleck8 5y ago
thanks for the insights!

Aerroon 5y ago

I really like Geizhals. It provides a way better UX than Amazon for browsing computer hardware and other electronics. My only gripe with it is how many stores only sell to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I know that it's not geizhals' fault. Because of this, it's mostly an improved way to search Amazon for me. It's a bit funny that if I were in a richer country, where people are paid more, the price of commuter hardware would be cheaper.

codethief 5y ago

Wow, I didn't know this site still existed! I seem to remember that ~15 years ago it regularly showed up in Google search results but it doesn't anymore. I'm wondering what happened – did they stop spending a ton of money on Adwords?

lazyjones 5y ago
The .eu domain was never really pushed, it's been using NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW for many years to avoid duplicated content penalties from Google and double crawling. The .at/.de domains should still be very visible in Google, at least they were a few years ago when I checked regularly (I use Duckduckgo exclusively).

reirob 5y ago

Finally a website where i can filter for criteria I need, down to stuff like keyboard without number block, with Trackpoint (on the site it's called pointing stick). No other site i know does this, not even the vendors themselves.

butonic 5y ago

Please don't think they crawl the web. The shops listed on their page send them detailed catalogs in XML. It's a mess. To my knowledge this is how it is done at geizhals, idealo and even google.