So I have been staring at this one Sony lens for weeks now because my sister is finally graduating from her film program in June and I really want to get her something that she will actually use for her career. The problem is the price tag is honestly terrifying lol. Its like 2300 dollars usually but I saw on a reddit thread that it dropped to 1900 for like four hours last month and of course I missed it because I was at work and not just refreshing Amazon every five minutes.

I started looking into how to actually track this stuff without losing my mind and I found two main ones which are CamelCamelCamel and Keepa. Camel seems okay but the website looks like it hasnt been updated since 2010 and I read some reviews saying the email alerts can be delayed by a few hours which would mean I miss the deal anyway if its a lightning thing or a limited stock sale. Then I looked at Keepa but it looks super complicated with all those charts and I think I saw someone say you have to pay a monthly subscription now to get the really detailed price drop notifications? I really dont want to add another monthly sub to my life especially when I am trying to save every penny for this lens.

I live in a smaller town so I cant just pop into a Best Buy to price match easily and Amazon is really my only option for getting it delivered on time. Is there like a hidden setting in the Amazon app itself that I am missing? I tried adding it to a list and turning on notifications but I never seem to get anything. Or maybe a different tool that works better for mobile? I just need something that is 100% free and actually reliable enough to ping my phone the second the price hits my target. I am worried if I wait too long the price will actually go up because of inflation or whatever... does anyone actually use these tools successfully for big ticket electronics without paying for the premium versions?