Shopping Engine Decide.com Rolls Out Premium Pricing: “When To Buy” Recommendations Now $5 Per Month

Decide.com, the shopping search engine that tells consumers both what and when to buy, is introducing its premium level of service today. Starting now, Decide.com will begin to charge for its “when to buy” recommendations – the recommendations which serve as Decide.com’s distinguishing feature versus the other shopping search services on the market currently.

The “when to buy” recommendations and Decide’s price guarantees (a money-back offer which will pay you if the price drops when Decide predicted otherwise) will now be $4.99/month or $29.99/year.

Built by former Farecast engineers, Decide uses similar technology to track price shifts for products as Farecast did to track airline ticket prices prior to its Microsoft acquisition. Using proprietary algorithms, Decide analyzes the fluctuations in price for the products it indexes, also taking into account things like historical product release cycles, news reports, company announcements, and more. Put simply, it’s the engine that could have told you to wait before buying a new iPad last week, as it would have known that Apple was likely to announce a new model yesterday.

The company advised users of the coming change via blog post a few weeks ago, and CEO Mike Fridgen explains that moving to premium pricing will help Decide keep its recommendations unbiased and objective, as it won’t need to rely on advertisers to generate revenue.

Going forward, the “what to buy” recommendations will remain free as will the price alerting feature, he adds.

To date, Decide has provided over 10 million users with “when to buy” recommendations since its launch in June 2011, which it calculates to be $127 million in potential savings. Although it started with a focus on gadgets, it now offers over a dozen product categories, including home appliances, sports equipment, home and garden, other electronics, and more. The service is now seeing hundreds of thousands of visitors per month and growing, and gets over 1 million pageviews per month.

Below, a screenshot of how Decide will present the upgrade option to users, starting today: