How We Select Deals

Vaultee publishes a small, checked selection — not a full listing of what a shop has on offer. Most of the products we look at never reach the site. This page explains the bar a product has to clear, first in general and then category by category.

The rules that apply to every category

• A named reference price. A "discount" only means something if you know what it is measured against. Every category says which reference it uses, and a product only gets in if its current price sits clearly below it. Where the reference can be a launch price that few people still pay, as with hardware, we put our own price record next to it.
• The reference is shown, not hidden. Where we say a product is below its reference, the page shows the reference and the gap, so you can check the claim yourself.
• Nothing is paid for. No brand or shop can buy a place here. The affiliate link is attached after a product has been selected and plays no part in the decision (Affiliate Disclosure).
• Prices move. Every entry shows the price and the date we last checked it. The price that counts is always the one on the shop's own page at the moment you buy.

Each category gets its own reference price and its own way of comparing products, because what makes a good deal differs: a LEGO set is not judged like an SSD. A category is only added once it has a reference we trust.

LEGO

Reference price: LEGO's own official list price for the set, sourced independently of the shop.

A set only enters the selection if its current price sits below that official list price. At or above list price, there is nothing to point out, so it doesn't appear. That is the whole bar — there is no hidden scoring formula. In practice it is a strict one: most LEGO sets advertised as "on sale" are at or above LEGO's own list price.

From there, you can sort the selection two ways:

• Percentage below list price — how far under LEGO's own price the set currently sits.
• Price per piece — what a single piece costs you (shown for sets of 100 pieces or more, where the number is meaningful).

These measure different things, and a set can rank well on one and poorly on the other: a modest saving on a very large set can still beat a bigger-looking percentage on a small one when you count it per piece. We show both instead of folding them into a single number.

Every set page also shows the price we record each morning as a chart, against LEGO's list price, so you can see whether today's price is a good moment to buy.

The "Retired" badge. A set marked Retired is no longer manufactured by LEGO. Once the remaining stock is gone it tends to become harder — and often pricier — to find. We flag it because it is a genuine reason to consider a set beyond the price alone, not because it changes how the price itself is judged.

PC hardware

What we cover: graphics cards, processors, motherboards, memory, SSDs, PC cases, cooling, power supplies, monitors, mice and keyboards, from the brands most builders and gamers choose. Accessories, spare parts, used or refurbished items, laptop and server components and prebuilt PCs are left out, and so are keyboards with a layout other than QWERTY.

Reference price: the brand's list price, the price the manufacturer or its supplier recommends, as Bol.com shows it next to its own price ("Adviesprijs ASUS" on Bol.com). We label it the same way on every page, "ASUS list price", "Samsung list price" and so on, never "was". A component's list price often stays at its launch level while the market moves, so we always show it together with our own price record.

The bar. A component is listed only when all of these hold on the day:

• Buyers don't rate it badly. A component rated below 4 stars by 5 or more buyers on Bol.com is left out. Bol.com has few reviews on most components, so we don't require them; where there are 5 or more, the stars are shown on the page.
• The specifications check out. We read the model, capacity, speed and socket from the product title first and from Bol.com's specification sheet second, and we test them against how components actually work: a B550 board is AM4, a Ryzen 7000 processor is AM5. A listing whose details contradict each other is left out, because we can't tell which product you would receive.
• Bol.com sells it at least 5% below the brand's list price.
• The price is today's. We check every price each morning; a component that is not on sale that morning is not listed.
• The price makes sense. A price far out of line with the rest of its category, such as an SSD costing several times more per terabyte than comparable drives, is held back: it is almost always a marketplace error, not a deal.

Our own price record. Every morning we record the price of more than 2,000 components. Each hardware page shows that history as a chart, the lowest price we have recorded, and, once we have 30 days, the lowest price of the last 30 days. A list price can be a launch price that nobody pays any more; the chart is how you check.

You can filter each category by the specifications that decide a purchase (socket, memory, capacity, interface and so on) and sort by the size of the discount, by price, by rating or, for SSDs and memory, by price per terabyte or gigabyte.

Prices can change

Prices can change at any time. The price that matters is the one on the shop's own product page the moment you buy, not the price shown here when we last checked. Always confirm the price with the shop before completing a purchase.