I’m a bargain hunter. I fully believe that paying full price is for suckers. I shop clearance and overstock sales, and generally find some amazing bargains. One of our recent acquisitions was a new H/K receiver that retails for about $500: we scored it for $175 thanks to careful shopping. I tend to carefully research my purchases before I pull the trigger, which is why I was intrigued when I got an Apple Genius recommendation to try out Decide Shopping & Price Predictor.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

Decide Shopping & Price Predictor is an iPhone app developed by Decide, Inc. This app helps you to shop smart, by virtue of its expert product recommendations, technical breakdowns, and price alerts.

Pros

• Clean, modern look
• Ad-free
• Get reviews and pricing predictions on items like home electronics, appliances, and home & garden gadgets
• Simple to see how highly a product has been rated based on aggregate reviews
• Price alerts keep you posted on value fluctuations on certain products
• Built-in barcode/QR scanner to help you compare prices while shopping in-store
• Searches across thousands of online and brick & mortar retailers
• Create a new login, or log in with Facebook

Cons

• Some features require premium membership, such as predictions about future price fluctuations, and Decide’s awesome price guarantee program
• While some free features of the app (scanner, search) can be used without signing up for an account, My Alerts requires login/signup

Discussion

I’m not usually an advocate for subscription/membership-based apps. That being said, it might be worth ponying up some dough up front to get a premium membership with Decide. My reason for saying this is simple: the membership can potentially pay for itself.

You see, Decide does this kind of cool thing. If you’re a premium member and you take their advice about when to buy a product, and that product price dips even lower in the next two weeks, Decide pays you the difference. Premium membership is actually pretty cheap: only $4.99/month or $29.99/year. If you’re building a house and planning to buy new appliances or garden devices like a lawnmower, this app gives you a lot of confidence when you compare prices.

My favorite part of this app is the interface. It’s fresh, modern, and easy to take in with just a quick glance. The rating bubble is an excellent way to get a snapshot of a product’s quality, allowing you to easily skim over a bunch of related products and not waste time on the lower quality offerings.

The barcode reader is fairly solid, though it can be a big sluggish. I also dislike the way you need to go back into the scanner part of the app after each failed scan: this makes it harder to scan a group of items quickly while in a store.

 Conclusion and download link

If you want to shop smarter, Decide Shopping & Price Predictor is one of the better price comparison and shopping advice apps that I’ve seen. The interface is nice, and despite the premium you have to pay to get some of the better features, this app still feels like a smart buy.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 2.5

Supported OS: Requires iOS 6.0 or later

Download size: 14.6 MB

Decide Shopping & Price Predictor on Apple App Store