How do I track Lego...
 
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How do I track Lego sets to buy them at their lowest price?

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Ive been collecting Lego for over a decade now but Im facing a new challenge trying to grab the UCS Falcon before it retires next year. My budget is strictly under 700 bucks so Im hunting for a deep discount.

So I was thinking about setting up automated price trackers. My logic was to use CamelCamelCamel or BrickWatch, but Camel keeps missing those flash sales on Amazon because of laggy scrape times, and BrickWatch seems super geared towards the EU whereas Im in Chicago. How do you guys actually track real-time US price drops without constantly refreshing pages?


3 Answers
12

Saw this thread and wanted to chime in since I went down this rabbit hole trying to get the UCS Star Destroyer a while back. Amazon is notorious for blocking scrapers, which is why Camel has that annoying lag. Here are a few US-focused options that actually work:

  • Distill.io. You can run this as a browser extension. It checks the page directly from your IP, so it doesnt get blocked like server-side scrapers. You can set it to check the price element every 10 mins. Downside is your PC has to be running.
  • Slickdeals alerts. Just set up a keyword alert for Lego UCS Falcon. The community there is insanely fast. By the time a scrapers API registers a drop, someone on Slickdeals has usually posted it.
  • BrickSeek. Decent for tracking Walmart and Target clearance in the Chicago area, though theyve hidden some features behind a paywall lately.
  • Keepa. Much faster than Camel for Amazon tracking, though the interface is kinda clunky. Personally, I used a mix of Distill for immediate page changes and Slickdeals. Took some setup but saved me a couple hundred bucks on my build.


10

I tried setting up a custom AWS Lambda scraper last year to track the UCS Star Destroyer API endpoints, but honestly it was a massive disaster and not as good as expected. I wanted to map out historical price-per-gram data and match it against regional warehouse inventory shifts.

  • The target site updated their Cloudflare config, instantly blocking my IP rotation pool.
  • Bandwidth costs for running headful Puppeteer instances 24/7 spiked to eighty bucks in the first week.
  • The DOM structure changed three times in a single month, which broke my parser. Unfortunately, it turned into a giant, expensive headache and I couldnt even get the data I wanted. Found PriceDropCatch a while back and now I just set a target price and wait for the alert.


3

Unfortunately, Amazon trackers have been disappointing lately. Try this instead:


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