InTuneDeals
Gear ScoutIn development

Find the deals
before everyone else

Gear Scout scans marketplaces like eBay and Reverb to uncover newly listed and underpriced music gear — so you can spot the opportunity before the crowd.

The idea

A second market, moving faster

InTuneDeals has always watched the retailers — the price drops that happen when a store decides to mark something down. Gear Scout watches the other half of the market: the one where the price is set by whoever happens to be selling, at whatever they happen to think it is worth that afternoon.

That market is far less efficient, and that is the whole point. A retailer never accidentally prices a vintage tube amp at a third of what it is worth. A seller clearing out a garage does it every day of the week. The catch is that those listings are found within the hour, and usually not by you.

Gear Scout is the scanner that closes that gap. It reads new marketplace listings as they post, checks each one against what that gear has recently sold for, and surfaces the ones priced well under their own market — while they are still available.

Under the hood

How it works

  1. 01

    Scan

    Gear Scout watches marketplace listings as they post rather than waiting for them to surface in search. New inventory is read within minutes of going live, while the seller is still the only person who knows it exists.

  2. 02

    Price

    Each listing is matched against what the same gear has actually been selling for — recent comparable sales, not wishful asking prices — so the question is never "is this cheap" but "is this cheap for what it is".

  3. 03

    Flag

    What comes back underpriced against its own market gets flagged, ranked by the size of the gap. Everything else stays quiet, because an alert you learn to ignore is worse than no alert.

What it looks for

The signals

  • Just listed

    The window between a listing going live and the market finding it is where the real prices are. That window is minutes, which is why it takes a scanner rather than a browser tab.

  • Under comps

    Priced below what the same model has recently sold for, with the comparison shown, so you can judge the call rather than take it on faith.

  • Mispriced by accident

    Buy-it-now set at a fraction of market, a misspelt model name nobody is searching, an auction with no bids and an hour to run — the listings that are cheap because they are hard to find.

  • Worth reselling

    The gap between the asking price and the going rate, stated in dollars, so a flip is a number you can check rather than a hunch you have to trust.

Where it looks

The marketplaces

eBay and Reverb first: between them they carry most of the second-hand instrument trade, and both move quickly enough that being early is worth something. More sources will follow, chosen the same way we choose retailers — a source earns its place by having listings worth catching, not by being easy to read.

As with everything else here, we are independent of every marketplace named. Gear Scout will never rank a listing higher because of who is hosting it.

Status

Not open yet

Gear Scout is being built now and is not open to the public yet. There is nothing to sign up for beyond the alert list that already exists: join it and you will hear the day Gear Scout goes live, alongside the daily and weekly deal round-ups.

If there is gear you would want it watching first, or a marketplace you think we are wrong to leave out, tell us — jstanton812@gmail.com. It is a short list right now and early requests carry real weight.