Like it or not, the holiday shopping season is now in full effect. And for many of us, that also means our email inboxes are overflowing with deal advertisements. These days it’s not just the Groupons of the world who are sending these notes — local review websites, restaurant reservation websites, and regular retailers have gotten into the game of offering time-sensitive discounts.
A new app that launched this week called Frugalo aims to help people actually make sense of all this. Run by a two-person team — former Digg employees Michael Cieri and Scott Reynolds — and backed with seed funding from AngelPad, Frugalo wants to help separate the wheat from the chaff in the daily deal overload.
Frugalo connects with your Gmail account and assembles all your confirmed purchases from major deal sites — Groupon, Gilt Groupe, Bloomspot, Living Social, and others — in one place. The app can also send you a weekly email summary to keep you abreast of when various deals are set to expire.
A big part of Frugalo that sets it apart from other daily deal aggregation apps such as Yipit is the social aspect. From the get-go, the app is linked to your Facebook account — anyone who is your Facebook friend is automatically your Frugao friend. This allows you to see the deals your friends are buying and collaborate on purchases with them. It also helps Frugalo learn about other deals that may be of interest to you in the future, by monitoring the activity of your larger social circle.
“There’s still hunger for deep savings, but people are just overwhelmed with mediocre deals that don’t make sense to them,” Cieri said in an interview this week. “That’s why we want to help unearth relevant deals that do make sense to people, and use social as a signal to promote good offers.”
Daily deal fatigue is a very real thing, so I think Frugalo is on to something here. I like saving money as much as anyone, but I have recently unsubscribed from many daily deal and retailer mailing lists just because I got so tired of receiving 40 different coupon emails each day. But Frugalo just might convince me to get back on the daily deal bandwagon.
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