Deals to Drink: The cheap beer app

Looking for the best deal on a case of beer? There’s an app for that now.

If you are in Sydney or Brisbane (or, rather strangely, Gainesville Florida) a new app will let you find deals for buying beer. Dealstodrink allows you to compare prices on beer and liquor at your local stores and alerts you to deals. It’s a simple, no-frills interface that provides you exactly that information. There’s nothing on the site to tell you where the information is being sourced so I have no idea how comprehensive it is, but on its face it seems to be good.

Ross Beard, who created the app, tells me his motivation was:

Basically, the idea started a few months back. Like a lot of Aussies, I’m always looking for a special or a deal to save some money. That’s no different for purchasing beer and liquor. So.. every Thursday and Friday I’d be scrolling through the newspaper, having a quick look to see what the big bottle shop chains had on special for the weekend. Depending if BWS, Liquorland, Dan Murphy’s or whichever store had my favourite beer or liquor on special, I would go buy from that particular store.

I think the utility of this app comes down to the way you buy beer. Myself I’m struggling to see it as I tend to just buy from my local bottleshop and not quite so often that I look for weekly specials. If you are prepared to shop around and buy smaller amounts more frequently then this app could be very handy.

A few additional features could make it handier still. First it would be good to be able to see what’s happening only in your local bottle shops rather than across the whole of Sydney. I’m not going to drive 50km for a 10 per cent discount on a case of beer. Secondly it might be useful if you could set alerts so that the app tells you when something is on special – it strikes me that’s likely to encourage beer sales. The currently available version is their first release and Ross Beard says there are additional features on the way.

This is one of those situations where you’ll not know if the app is useful until you try it for a few weeks. You should probably download the app or bookmark the site and see if it fits in with your way of shopping. If there’s a fit, this will be a very useful app.

The app releases in the App Store by 14 June. Right now it is available on Google Play and you can point your browser at dealstodrink.com to access the mobile site.

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