Steal These Deals: Technology

Sites Where You Save

Web crawlers and bots help you find discounts.The deal seeker of all deal seekers is Dodtracker.com. This site monitors more than 200 sources for deal-of-the-day offers.

For bargains on bling, your destination is Bluenile.com. It can sell quality diamonds for up to 40% less than traditional stores. Shipping is free and there’s a 30-day return policy.

You may never pay full price again if you become a regular user of RetailMeNot.com. You can search by store or by item to find thousands of printable coupons and codes for online shopping.

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Shopzilla.com is a comparison-shopping Web site that combs cyberspace to locate bargains. A search for “hammock” returned almost 300 choices, ranging from $29 to $140.

Never miss a clothing sale with ShopItToMe.com. Sign up for free e-mail alerts by entering brand names and sizes; the site will tell you when to pounce.

Visit StubHub.com before you buy event tickets and you can probably find a better price. The site guarantees you’ll have the tix in time for the show.

Pay-As-You-Go Mobile

You get cheap minutes and no messy contract. If you have the lowest-price cell-phone contract you can get but forfeit unused minutes every month, a prepaid plan would be a better deal. You pay in advance for bundles of airtime—and you don’t commit to a two-year contract.

With the help of Alan Keiter, president of MyRate­Plan.com, we picked a prepaid bargain, plus the best phone, for four users:

Emergency caller. You pay just 10 cents a minute for the T-Mobile Pay As You Go plan (www.t-mobile.com), and the minutes don’t expire for a year if you buy the $100 refill card with 1,000 minutes. Plus, the plan-compatible, no-frills Nokia 1661 phone costs just $20.

Moderate user. Calls on Net10 (www.net10.com) cost 10 cents a minute, and text messages cost 5 cents each. The Samsung T201G phone is $40 and comes with 300 minutes of calling.

Road warrior. You get unlimited calls for $50 a month with Virgin Mobile USA (www.virginmobileusa.com). Add unlimited texting for $10 a month; 50 megabytes (about 5,000 e-mails) of monthly Web access is $10 more. Best phone for this plan is the $100 Kyocera X-tc.

Teen. Unlimited text messaging and free calls after 9 p.m. and on weekends make the Boost Mobile Daily Chat & Text plan (www.boostmobile.com) teen-friendly. You pay a $1-per-day subscription fee, and daytime calls cost 10 cents a minute. Best phone: Motorola Moto i776 ($99).