Heads up!!! Here’s your massive holiday sports tech deals list! This includes the Garmin Epix for just $419, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 for just $699, the GoPro Hero 12 Black for $249, (or the brand new Hero 13 or $299!) and plenty more! Go check out the full list of 100+ deals here!
I’m DC RAINMAKER…
Here’s how to save!
Wanna save some cash and support the site? These companies help support the site! With Backcountry.com or Competitive Cyclist with either the coupon code DCRAINMAKER for first time users saving 15% on applicable products.
You can also pick-up tons of gear at REI via these links, which is a long-time supporter as well:
Alternatively, for everything else on the planet, simply buy your goods from Amazon via the link below and I get a tiny bit back as an Amazon Associate. No cost to you, easy as pie!
You can use the above link for any Amazon country and it (should) automatically redirect to your local Amazon site.
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Check out my weekly podcast - with DesFit, which is packed with both gadget and non-gadget goodness!
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5 Easy Steps To The Site
1
In Depth Product Reviews
You probably stumbled upon here looking for a review of a sports gadget. If you’re trying to decide which unit to buy – check out my in-depth reviews section. Some reviews are over 60 pages long when printed out, with hundreds of photos! I aim to leave no stone unturned.
2
Read My Sports Gadget Recommendations.
Here’s my most recent GPS watch guide here, and cycling GPS computers here. Plus there are smart trainers here, all in these guides cover almost every category of sports gadgets out there. Looking for the equipment I use day-to-day? I also just put together my complete ‘Gear I Use’ equipment list, from swim to bike to run and everything in between (plus a few extra things). And to compliment that, here’s The Girl’s (my wife’s) list. Enjoy, and thanks for stopping by!
3
Have some fun in the travel section.
I travel a fair bit, both for work and for fun. Here’s a bunch of random trip reports and daily trip-logs that I’ve put together and posted. I’ve sorted it all by world geography, in an attempt to make it easy to figure out where I’ve been.
4
My Photography Gear: The Cameras/Drones/Action Cams I Use Daily
The most common question I receive outside of the “what’s the best GPS watch for me” variant, are photography-esq based. So in efforts to combat the amount of emails I need to sort through on a daily basis, I’ve complied this “My Photography Gear” post for your curious minds (including drones & action cams!)! It’s a nice break from the day-to-day sports-tech talk, and I hope you get something out of it!
5
The Swim/Bike/Run Gear I Use List
Many readers stumble into my website in search of information on the latest and greatest sports tech products. But at the end of the day, you might just be wondering “What does Ray use when not testing new products?”. So here is the most up to date list of products I like and fit the bill for me and my training needs best! DC Rainmaker 2023 swim, bike, run, and general gear list. But wait, are you a female and feel like these things might not apply to you? If that’s the case (but certainly not saying my choices aren’t good for women), and you just want to see a different gear junkies “picks”, check out The Girl’s Gear Guide too.
First!
Nothing to add…
How about a short list of trainers (preferably smart) that will work with kids bikes, 20″ wheels, 24″, etc or small frames for 700/650c wheels? I’m sure the article will be short!
Hi,
I had three 28″ Road & TT bikes which would not fit onto my Tacx Neo. To my surprise, the 24″ Scott Speedster JR Road Bike of my daughter fits the Tacx Neo without any clearance issues.
Brgds, Frank
Hi,
I had three 28″ Road & TT bikes which would not fit onto my Tacx Neo. To my surprise, the 24″ Scott Speedster JR Road Bike of my daughter fits the Tacx Neo without any clearance issues.
Brgds, Frank
Kurt Kinetic Road Machine-my 650c road bike is on there now, but it’s worked with every bike we’ve tried in my home (26”, 24”, 700c) and the website says it will go down to 22”. I’ve had it, 10 years? Just added the Bluetooth/ANT+ speed and power thingy and like that in theory I could add the controller mechanism to the frame of the trainer I already have.
If only 4iiii Wiiiind was in stock somewhere!
This is amazing! Is there any chance you could add power meters to your alerting tool, or are they too varied with the different crank lengths/ring combos/etc?
It’d be tough. For straight-forward ones like the Favero Assioma or Vector 3 or something where there’s basically only one product sold (minus the left-only editions), then it’s easy – in fact, we’re already tracking and alerting for it today to some e-mail addresses, namely…mine.
Where it gets messier is all the variants you noted. We do have tie-ins to exact SKU’s, but I’ve only recently started handling/tracking that, and only on a handful of products.
Still, once we get this all settled, then we’ll figure out what makes sense beyond this. Cheers!
Ray,
This is a great new feature. Please, please, please expand this to include sports tech on sale deals
Yup, definitely! We’re tracking prices today. It’s moderately fascinating, though less exciting in the US due to MAP (Minimized Advertised Price), and then of course, more complex in Europe.
I suspect we’d roll it out in the US first, merely to catch all the random Amazon deals on sports tech gear when they decide to ignore MAP. Whereas in Europe, any retailer can sell for any price, and I wouldn’t really want an alerting system that sends out an alert to a hundred people for a retailer that has one unit on-hand to game the system.
Can you make one for graphics cards? Impossible to find and never in stock.
You can find something for popular graphics cards and other stuff at hotstock.io, which a lot of people are using for PS5s.
Thank you!
Ray, in case you didn’t already know, you are awesome. Thank you!
Thanks!
Hi….howncan i get listed? As a elite dealer? With stock
Hi Armin-
At the moment I’m still working out the kinks with the larger sites and seeing how viable it is to expand to smaller ones.
But, in the meantime I went and fixed the URL in your comment so it points at your site, for Germany folks that are looking for Elite units or rocker plates.
Cheers!
Where I am (Netherlands) smart trainers are out of stock since the summer. I left my email address with one of the bigger stores, to be notified when they were back in stock again. But that list is simply too long so I heard nothing. Half of januari I saw reviews appearing from people who got their trainers. I bookmarked the page and refreshed it at least 10 times a day. Two weeks later it said 10+ in stock (Tacx Flux S). I placed the order, when I was finished and got the confirmation I checked the site again and they were all gone. The more expensive models were gone a few minutes later. So if you want one, you will have to act quickly.
Yeah, it’s funny, I suspect I know which retailer – and also signed up manually for some alerts. And then even tried to buy a nit and mid-way through it was gone.
This is really really smart for an affiliate marketing model. Win win!
If only this was available a week ago it would have made my Saturday much easier, luckily I got one in stock eventually (after reading your trainer guide, very helpful btw!) and happily pedalling away since yesterday! :)
Nice tool, however it gave me an alert to another product, not the one I was subscribed to.
Well that’s less than ideal…and the first I’ve heard of that in all the people that have signed up.
I’ll follow-up with you via e-mail for more details. We’ve got tons of logging, so we can look into it.
In the meantime – hope you got a deal on the other trainer instead. ;)
Thanks!
If ever a sign of times…
I was looking for an Elite Suito as of march last year. That took quite a bit of effort (and even more patience). At least back then I encountered a couple smaller online retailers that would list the item as stocked, take my money and only then give notice of redicoulus delivery times. Hope the DCR STAT is smart enough to deal with those sites.
Yeah, that’s a core reason why for the moment I’m starting with retailers I have direct partnerships with, which in turn happened after a lot of vetting. We’ve been stock tracking for months now, aiming to flush out inconsistencies and such – and I think we’re in a really good spot.
Which isn’t to say there aren’t good smaller shops. Two of my local bike shops that I use are awesome, and I often refer locals to for getting a trainer or such, as they have accurate timeframes and waitlists. But it’s just hard with thousands of local bike shops across Europe (or dozens upon dozens of smaller online bike retailers in Europe) to separate good from less than honest.
Good to see an Australian website (Amazon.au) on there!
Thanks! Yeah, it does indeed work for all the Amazon sites, but they don’t all carry all trainers. Cheers!
Great initiative, thanks Ray!
I just received my first notification, but this was from rei.com which only seems to ship to the USA (based on checkout address options). As I live in the Netherlands, in general I would only want to buy a trainer in the EU, because of lower shipping costs, certainty of two-year warranty, and less hassle in case the unit breaks and needs to be sent back. So I was wondering: would it be difficult to provide a feature where the user can indicate from which region(s) (e.g. USA, EU) they want to receive offers? Cheers!
Hi Nick!
Interesting, you actually shouldn’t even be offered/shown the REI options (nor Backcountry or CompetitiveCyclist or Amazon US). If you’re the Netherlands you should only be seeing or receiving alerts EU sites (Wiggle/Amazon EU’s). Interestingly, if I look at your record behind the scenes it shows ‘EU’ versus a specific country (normally it’d say NL/etc…).
Any chance you were using a VPN? In any case, if you can forward me the alert (just ray at my domain), that’d be great, and then we can dig into it and see what the root cause might be.
Cheers!
Hi Ray,
thanks for your offer to take a look. I forwarded to you the alert email and provided some more details. Hope that helps.
Cheers!
Thanks Nick-
And just as a quick follow-up for others, we tracked this down to a weird parsing issue in how we were handling certain Switzerland users that weren’t showing up in the geo-tool we leverage as CH (proper code for Switzerland), but randomly EU (which isn’t a ‘country’ per se). All fixed within a few hours of Nick mentioning it.
Thanks!
Hi Ray,
great to read you got it fixed. For the record, I didn’t intend to confuse your nifty tool by using a VPN tunnel to Switzerland :-)
Thanks!
Judging from a few sites, it seems Elite retired the Suito from its lineup for the foreseeable future. The Suito-T remains tho, so I guess they just gave up on waiting for cassettes that never come.
FYI Bike-discount.de has them in stock these days.
BTW, Ray, any chance the script you used is in Git? I wanted to do a similar scraper (I guess this is a scraper) to monitor some components and would be curious to get inspiration.
So they are still producing the Suito, in fact, a bunch just came into stock this morning at REI. But they’re also making the Suito T. Essentially, the global shortage on cassettes has driven them to still to offer/make both versions. The only difference is the Suito T doesn’t come with a cassette.
As for the script, it’s actually part of a much larger product suite that the development team I hire works on. Sorry!
Interesting. My commend was based on the fact that both BD mentioned above as well as B24 recently unlisted the cassette-fitted Suito. And I don’t mean like “flagged it as unavailable”, they removed its product page altogether.
So generally speaking, but also for Elite specifically, retailers/distributors have placed orders for the entirety of 2021 inventory already. So a retailer like REI or Wiggle for example, would likely have placeholder orders for the entire year already – or a large chunk of it. Those are tied to specific delivery timeframes and quantities – such as 500 units of the Elite Suito in February, 500 units in March, etc. Obviously, quantities vary from company to company. A multi-thousand unit order delivery for a larger retailer is 100% the norm.
Whereas other retailers might not have done that yet, and thus, may be locked into alternative products – such as the Suito T.
Any chance of adding inventory if buying direct from manufacturers?
I’m not horribly opposed to it down the road, though I’m currently focused on those partners that support the site here. And since I have a policy against partnering directly with any manufacturer for anything (including giveaways), I won’t do direct referrals there for affiliate link type stuff. But, would just do general links there if so.
That said, I totally get that the value for people is also including as many inventory sources as possible – hence why I’m not opposed to it in general, but for now I kinda want to get stabilized on the partners first.
Hopefully that makes sense!
Sure does.
Thanks!
Magene T100 is also in stock for 360 Euros on amazon.de link to amazon.de
Kickr v5 and Kickr Core are in stock on Wahoo EU website for a week or so. Just sitting there…
Seeing US prices from Germany. Too bad.
Hi Henni-
That’s super weird. The only reason you should see US prices is if we fail to recognize your location, which is pretty weird. Or, if we think you’re in the US.
Any chance you’re using a VPN?
Hey Ray,
how can one register into your “search engine” – friend of mine has a shop where he’s got Tacx trainers. Czech republic.
BR
Mike
Any thoughts on the cheap direct drive trainers? I’ve seen the Magene T100 and I’m wondering if it’s ok (350€ more or less)