CompanyErdunCo-founderMay 26, 20264 min read
If you bought a refrigerator at Lowe's last month and the price has dropped since, Lowe's owes you the difference. So does Best Buy, Target, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Staples, JCPenney, Macy's, and roughly every other retailer of meaningful size in the United States. Most hotel chains have a Best Rate Guarantee that works similarly. So do every major airline.
Almost nobody collects.
Price-protection policies have been around for decades. The terms vary: windows range from 7 days to 90 days, eligibility differs by category, some require in-store proof and some accept email forwards. But the structure is the same. You buy something, the price drops inside a window, you file with customer service, and the retailer refunds the difference.
By most estimates, well under 5% of eligible price drops result in actual refund claims. The reasons are unremarkable: people don't know the policy exists, they don't track their own purchases, they don't notice price changes after the fact, and even if they do, filing a single claim takes 20-40 minutes of work for a refund that's often $20-60. The math discourages anyone from bothering once, let alone systematically.
Paribus was the first widely-known service to automate this. They were acquired by Capital One in 2016 and rolled into Capital One Shopping, but the original automated-claim-filing capability quietly receded over time. Earny and a handful of others have come and gone. The space has been littered with services that automate the easy half (detecting price drops) without automating the hard half (actually filing claims that get approved).
Filing claims is hard because every retailer is different. Best Buy uses an in-store guide flow. Marriott responds to a specific phrasing in an email. Some airlines refund automatically if you ask; others require a portal. Building a system that does all of this reliably, at scale, with high approval rates, is most of the work. It's exactly where price-protection services have historically failed.
ClaimIt's bet is that LLM-based agents are now good enough at handling heterogeneous customer-service workflows that the hard half can finally be automated. Not perfectly. But well enough that you can connect your Gmail once and get refunds you would never have collected manually.
We don't think the money was unclaimed because consumers didn't care. We think it was unclaimed because the cost of caring exceeded the reward. ClaimIt drops the cost.
Erdun
Co-founder
Most major retailers and airlines refund you when prices drop after purchase, but only if you ask. ClaimIt does the asking, automatically, across 26 platforms.
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