Methodology — how GunDealAlerts calculates prices
GunDealAlerts is an independent firearm price tracker — 12,504 verified deal prices across 1,919 products from 891 retailers since 2024.
Where the prices come from
Prices are collected from publicly posted deals on r/gundeals and the retailer pages those posts link to. Each observation records the price, the retailer domain, the product it was matched to, and the moment it was seen. A price is only ever observed — GunDealAlerts does not query retailer inventory and does not claim to know what anything costs right now. That is why every figure on the site is published with a date attached.
How products are grouped
Deals are matched to a product family, and families are segmented before any statistic is computed: new and used are priced separately, ammunition is priced per round rather than per box, and bundles, accessories and mis-extracted prices are excluded. Without that segmentation a single $15 shipping charge or a $632 barreled upper lands in a pistol’s price range and the whole figure becomes meaningless.
What each figure means
- Street price — the median of deals tracked in the last 90 days. If fewer than three deals fall in that window, no street price is published; a 90-day claim needs 90 days of data, and quietly widening the window while still calling it “90-day” would be a fabrication.
- Lowest tracked — the lowest price ever observed, shown with the month it was observed. It is a historical fact, not an available price, and it is never published without its date.
- Most recent — the newest deal tracked, with its date. When the newest deal is old, the page says so rather than presenting it as current.
- Deal bands — the 10th, 25th and 75th percentiles of a product’s tracked prices, which is what “a great price” and “above average” mean here. They are percentiles of observed data, not editorial opinion.
What we will not do
No figure is published that cannot be dated. No page stamps today’s date on an older number. Where a product has too little data to describe, the page says that instead of quoting a statistic computed from two postings. A missing number is a smaller failure than a confident wrong one.
Corrections
Every price guide and product page lists the deals its figures came from, so an error is traceable to a specific observation. Corrections change the record, not just the page.
