How we check codes
Where our coupon codes come from, what we reject, and what happens when one expires.
This page explains where the offers on Frugalery come from and what happens to them, so you can judge for yourself how much weight to put on anything here.
Where the offers come from
Everything on this site arrives from the affiliate networks the stores themselves use. Stores load their promotions into the network — the code, the conditions, the end date — and we receive that feed. A smaller number come from readers who email us a code they have used.
We do not scrape other coupon sites. Codes copied from a competitor are, in our experience, exactly how dead and invented codes spread.
What is rejected before anything goes live
- Masked codes. If the feed gives a code as
****the offer is either published as a no-code deal or dropped. We never present a placeholder as a working code. - Creator and personal codes. Codes tied to a named influencer are not ours to hand out and usually break that creator’s own agreement.
- Offers that do not work in the US. This site serves the United States. A code that only works on a store’s UK checkout is worse than no code.
- Offers that already ended. Anything whose end date has passed never gets published in the first place.
- Restricted categories. We do not list vaping, tobacco, cannabis or CBD, adult products, gambling, weapons or high-cost credit, regardless of what commission is on offer.
What happens after an offer goes live
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| The day the end date passes | The offer disappears from every live list, count and search result automatically. Nothing manual has to happen. |
| For 21 days after that | It appears on its store page in a “recently expired” block — struck through, with a red EXPIRED badge and the date it ended. The code button is replaced by “no longer works”. |
| After 21 days | It is unpublished and gone. |
| When a reader reports a dead code | We check and remove it, normally the same day. |
| When an advertiser or network asks | We remove the offer, normally within a few hours, and we do not ask why. |
What the terms on an offer mean
Where the store supplied its own terms text with the promotion, that is what we show. Where it did not, we set out the conditions we can read from the offer itself — minimum spend, new customers only, selected ranges — and say plainly that the store’s full terms apply at its checkout. The date on each offer is the date its record was last reviewed or updated by us.
What we cannot promise
A store can withdraw a code at any moment, cap how many times it can be used, restrict it to certain products, or end a promotion early, and it does not have to tell us. So a code here can still fail at checkout. If one does, tell us — that report is the fastest way anything gets fixed.
Sending us a code
If you have a code that works and is not on the site, send the store name, the code and what it gives. If it is a general public code and it works, we will add it. We will not publish a code that looks personal to one account, an employee code, or one obtained by getting around a store’s own rules.