privacy

I feel bad for not trying hard or smart enough

People who have accounted for their own spent time often feel the coupons are wasteful. That's before accounting for the costs of purchases made that could have been skipped, or where the discount led to buying a worse product, and needing to rebuy a better one later.

wondering if there are privacy trade-offs.

I'm not familiar with that service, but it's a safe bet that it has privacy costs. People don't set up and organize discount programs out of kind heartedness. At best they plan to sell us something we don't need. At worst they're selling everything they can learn about us to anyone with a nickel.

Sometimes codes have worked for me, so I've certainly saved a few bucks. They probably just track IP, I guess; I can tolerate that. RetailMeNot is no longer a leader in my experience since there are so many other websites that have followed its style; I just now search, "X promo code," where X = the name of the company providing the good or service in question, and try the first few links.

You can always follow me in using something like NoScript to block all website scripts, and then guess at which ones to try to whitelist in the hopes of unveiling the code with minimal data leakage otherwise. Close any popups immediately.

They're basically scams. Most of the codes they give don't even work, and affiliate links are also designed in ways to screw over the affiliates.

Retailmenot is worthless. It was bought out at some point and all that is posted now is links to the % off offers you see in pop ups when you go directly to the retailer’s website.

Use an open source one like syrup https://github.com/Abdallah-Alwarawreh/Syrup