DealsPlus

» see dealsplus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DealsPlus was a coupon board. Shoppers posted codes and price drops they had found, and other shoppers voted and commented on whether those codes actually worked, which pushed the useful ones up the page. That model put it third for the big coupon search terms in a Priceonomics analysis, behind RetailMeNot and Coupons.com, which is a strong finish for a site running on volunteer submissions against two companies with marketing budgets.

The launch date on the record is 18 July 2006, though the Internet Archive was already fetching pages from the site on 23 May that year, so it was publicly serving something for about two months before it considered itself open. By its peak it claimed roughly six million users. Company directories name Kiha Lee as the founder and chief executive and put the operation in Campbell, California; Wikipedia's entry is a stub that names nobody at all, a decent measure of how little attention this got for its size.

Coupon sites are among the least romantic things the consumer web produced and among the most durable. There is no network effect to lose and no feed to get addicted to. Somebody wants money off a thing they were buying anyway, searches for a code, and either the code works or it does not. DealsPlus did that for eighteen years, which outlasts most of the social networks whose deaths get written up.

It ended without saying anything. A heavy crawl in the second week of October 2024 pulled down the home page at fifty-seven kilobytes along with thousands of individual coupon pages, all answering normally. The apex was still redirecting correctly on 8 November. By 12 December 2024 the address returned 404, and from 7 January 2025 it was answering with a Cloudflare 530, the code for a DNS record that has outlived its server.

~ the chronicle ~

~ losing its own name ~

For the first seven years this site was spelled dealspl.us, finishing its own name inside the United States country code. Domain hacks were everywhere in that period because the good .com names had been bought in 1999 by people who had no plans for them, and a startup in 2006 either paid a squatter or got creative with a suffix.

DealsPlus tried the formal route first. In 2010 it filed a UDRP complaint to have dealsplus.com transferred to it, arguing in effect that it was the company the name belonged to. The panel refused. Owning a brand does not entitle you to the matching domain unless you can show the holder registered it in bad faith against you, and a name made of two ordinary English words is a hard place to prove that.

So it paid instead. In early 2013 DealsPlus bought dealsplus.com for an undisclosed sum and moved the whole site across, redesigning some of the branding to suit having a grown-up address. Today dealspl.us still exists and still answers, by bouncing visitors to a hostname beginning ww38. That prefix belongs to a parking service, so the first address this company ever had now earns its keep on stray traffic.

~ paying the crowd ~

One detail separates DealsPlus from the rest of the user-generated pile: it paid. Alongside the general public there was a group the site called Money Makers, submitting deals for a floor of three hundred dollars a month, with the actual figure moving according to how the deals performed. That is a wage, a small one, and it means a chunk of the site's content was labor rather than enthusiasm, years before anybody was calling that a creator economy.

I never used it for a dull and complete reason: American retail coupons are worth nothing to somebody shopping in Turkey. Membership bought you codes for stores I could not walk into and shipping I could not receive. Its whole inventory was geographic. What is left of it is three hostnames in different states of refusal. The host that actually served the site, www.dealsplus.com, no longer resolves; the apex sits behind a Cloudflare challenge that never finishes, and the old dealspl.us address has been rented out to a parking service.

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