How pricing works

A quick explainer on where the numbers come from, what the signals mean, and the limits of what I track.

Where prices come from

I crawl Atlantic Cigar Co, Cigars International, Famous Smoke Shop, Gotham Cigars, and Holt's Cigar Co directly on a roughly 24-hour cycle. Each run visits the live product pages and pulls the current price, sale flag, and stock status. I don’t use static feeds for pricing (those go stale fast); every number you see was read from the retailer’s own page.

When a crawler runs, it updates the listing current price for each product and appends a row to the price history only if the price actually changed. That keeps the history clean — consecutive identical prices don’t pile up.

What “lowest tracked” means

Every vitola page shows a “lowest tracked” price. That’s the lowest price I’ve recorded since I started tracking that particular vitola — not an all-time historical low going back years. The catalog was rebuilt from scratch in early 2026, so tracking depth varies: some vitolas have six months of history, others were added more recently and have only a few weeks.

Each vitola shows how many days it’s been tracked. If that number is small, treat the “lowest” signal with appropriate skepticism — the data window is short. Longer tracking windows give the deal score more to work with and make the signal more reliable.

How the deal score works

The deal score (0–100) answers one question: how good is today’s price compared to this cigar’s own tracked history? It’s not a quality rating and it doesn’t compare across different cigars — a 90 on a budget smoke and a 90 on a prestige line just mean both are unusually cheap relative to their own norms.

Three inputs go into the score:

• Percentile rank — where today’s price falls within all recorded prices for that vitola. A price lower than 80% of historical readings scores higher than one that beats only 30%.
• vs. average — how far the current price sits below (or above) the running average. A price 10% below the average gets a meaningful bonus; one above average gets a penalty.
• Sale flag — if the retailer is marking it as a sale, a small bonus is applied (five points). This is a minor signal, not the dominant one.

Scores require at least five historical data points — new or rarely-discounted vitolas simply show no score until enough history accumulates. A score of 70 or above is the “buy” threshold; below that it’s a “worth waiting” signal.

The trend arrow (up/down/stable) is separate from the score. It compares the last seven days of prices against the same vitola’s prices from 23–30 days ago. A move of less than 2% either direction is classified as stable.

What I don’t do

No pay-for-placement. Retailers cannot pay to appear higher in results, get a better deal badge, or have their prices shown preferentially. The cheapest price wins the lowest-price highlight regardless of whether the click earns me an affiliate commission.

Affiliate links are disclosed. Some “Go to retailer” links are affiliate links — if you buy something after clicking, I might earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That commission has no bearing on the rankings or signals. Full disclosure is on the About page.

Prices can lag up to ~24 hours. Because I crawl on a daily cycle, a flash sale that goes live and expires in the same day may not appear (or may linger briefly after it ends). Always check the retailer directly before buying — the price shown is what I last saw, not a live quote.

I don’t track every cigar. CigarEdge covers a defined catalog of major brands. If a cigar you’re looking for isn’t here, it either hasn’t been added yet or isn’t stocked by the retailers I crawl. The catalog is growing — if there’s a brand you want to see tracked, drop me a line.