I've been self-hosting my own home server setup for probably six years now and I usually just grab parts whenever I see a discount. But right now I'm planning a pretty major storage overhaul before the holidays - looking to grab four 18TB drives with a budget of around $800. The thing is, I've run into this weird issue lately where Amazon's pricing feels completely fake.

My logic was just to watch the "list price" and buy when the discount percentage looked high. But last week I noticed a drive went from $199 to $249, and then two days later it was "on sale" for $209 with a big slash through the $249 price. It's super frustrating because they are clearly manipulation the pricing baseline.

So I was thinking about how to actually track this. At first I thought about spinning up a quick python scraper on my server to grab the HTML daily, but then I realized Amazon's anti-bot stuff would probably block my residential IP within a day or two unless I set up proxy rotation, which is way too much overhead for a simple purchase. There has to be a better way to view the actual history.

I remember people talking about browser extensions like Keepa or CamelCamelCamel back in the day, but I haven't kept up with them. Do those still work reliably with Amazon's current API restrictions? I'm trying to get these drives ordered by mid-November so I have time to pre-clear them before my holiday trip, and I really want to see the actual price fluctuations over the last 6 months to know if I'm getting ripped off or not. What's the standard tool people use for this now...