Robert Capps, Wired senior editor, has an article up called The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. It explores what happens when an established product meets a competitor that has most of the features at fraction of the price. Think hi-fi vs MP3s, A-10 bombers vs Predator drones or landline vs Skype. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 on Sep 1, 2009 - 74 comments

What’s so special about the super cars that make people spend cosmic sums on a single car to buy it? Here are the Most Expensive Supercars: Exotic Showcase. Looking for cheap wheels? Here they are — the ten least-expensive 2009 cars on sale in America. But sticker price insn't everything; here are the 10 most and least expensive cars to insure.
posted by netbros on Aug 22, 2009 - 57 comments

Crestwood is the "best-run town in America" because it's "run like a business".

"Our budget is $2 million dollars a year while a town of similar size, with 12,000 people, might have a budget of $10 million["], said City Director Frank Gassmere. Added Mayor Stranczek: "Folks are happy here and I intend to keep them that way."

Taxes are so low, property tax payers get rebates! Privatizing local government works brilliantly!As long as you didn't drink the cheap, cheap municipal water -- for the last twenty years.
posted by orthogonality on Apr 21, 2009 - 103 comments

Ten years ago Valve released Half Life, to the delight of gamers, modders, critics and people who hate cut scenes. Marc Laidlaw, writer for Valve, talks about the genesis of scientist turned crowbar wielding survivor, Gordon Freeman. Somehow avoided playing it in all these years? You can buy it on Steam for less than a dollar until midnight November 21st.
posted by Artw on Nov 20, 2008 - 86 comments

"What would you say if I told you that I filled my entire living room with completely original works of art for less than $300?" Andrea Dickson from Wise Bread has found an unlikely -- though, the more you think about it, almost obvious -- place to find original art from new artists: Ebay. If you can filter through the crapload of "artistic nudes", there are plenty of gems, and usually at buyers' market prices. And, as Andrea's mother mused, when it comes to decorating the house, it beats buying mass-produced art from Costco, which is about as original as a Big Mac.
posted by chakalakasp on Oct 1, 2008 - 35 comments

Attach syringes full of oil to the temples of a pair of double-lensed magic Harry Potter eyeglasses and let poor people see.
posted by orthogonality on Aug 4, 2008 - 57 comments

Webcomic artist D.J. Coffman offers to draw anything you want for $2 apiece.
posted by divabat on Jul 23, 2008 - 42 comments

Cope pipe without a jig. Enter a few parameters and get a pdf that will give you a printable pattern that will allow you to notch tubing for welding or brazing to another pipe.
posted by Mitheral on Mar 15, 2008 - 35 comments

The Tata Nano (pic) is a car that costs less new than the amount I've spent on gas during single car trips, recently announced to the auto market in India. The Chery QQ ^, successful , widely exported, and recognized as the Hostage Taker's Vehicle of Choice by China Car Times, is the runner-up for the world's cheapest car but is still approximately twice as expensive. Yes indeed, the price of gas is not going to come back down. So much for my coast-to-coast road trips. [more inside]
posted by XMLicious on Feb 3, 2008 - 42 comments

A selection of eyeglasses for $8. (That's including your lens prescription.) Or if that's not to your liking, there's $39.
posted by Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson on Sep 19, 2007 - 81 comments

When happy hour's over, and it's time to cruise back to trash someone's loungeroom, continue the tight-arse tradition with Boozle!
posted by pompomtom on Sep 18, 2007 - 8 comments

Since the US economy will soon explode and eat all our monies, I give you this: 100 Things You Can Make Yourself!
posted by ThePinkSuperhero on Aug 17, 2007 - 48 comments

POSSUM LIVING: How To Live Well Without a Job ..building a $100 Log Cabin, a geodesic dome out of cardboard.. handbook for cob building.. cheap solar power system.. stocking up on food.. some more
posted by petsounds on Feb 15, 2007 - 37 comments

WhichBudget.com: a site that helps you find a low cost airline flight for your destination
posted by champthom on Nov 20, 2006 - 40 comments

Attention Darren Sherman: When you go on a date with someone, and they offer to split the tab, once you've declined their offer it can be perceived as bad ettiquette to threaten to get a court summons for the money if they refuse a second date with you. Voicemails & emails of a JDate gone awry.
posted by jonson on Jul 5, 2006 - 73 comments

It took 30 years to spread from California to New York but the Trader Joe's grocery store chain is finally making a foothold in the Big Apple. The deniznes of NYC will now be able to obsess about something new. Not everyone is a fan, but maybe it's just that they haven't yet tried the Two-buck Chuck.
posted by scblackman on Mar 8, 2006 - 113 comments

"If ever a company needed a marketing department, it's New Choice, whose Original Flavor Round Crackers take the cake for stating the obvious. Points should be awarded for attempts to woo health-conscious consumers with facts about added DHA ("prevents heart attack, enhances eye sight"), but there's no two ways to look at Round Crackers: It's a badly executed Ritz rip-off." So sayeth the wits at the Onion A.V. Club, who scour the nation's dollar stores for food products to evaluate in their sporadic feature "Dining for a Dollar." Round crackers too boring? You might prefer Freakin' Nuts (tagline: Is it a chip? Is it a nut? Yes!), Thick Mints, or maybe just a handful of Balls. Their annual Cheap Toy Roundup is just as good; last year's featured products such as Preeminent Car ($1), Stretchy Body Bits ($1.19), and a DVD titled Clothes That Went to a Party ($2). Perhaps the all-time best, though, is the Mini Wooden Furniture: Table: a "plain, unadorned wooden table." ($1)
posted by anjamu on Mar 4, 2006 - 12 comments

Ndiyo systems consist of a central PC running Linux, serving a bunch of ultra-cheap, ultra-thin VNC-ish clients over 100Mbit Ethernet connections. The developers hope that mass production will soon make the clients cost as little as a typical video cable.
posted by flabdablet on Jan 16, 2006 - 32 comments

Simputer : High tech meets extreme poverty
posted by troutfishing on Sep 29, 2005 - 22 comments

White plastic chairs - Jens Thiel blogs his research of the ubiquitous chair we all love to hate for an upcoming monobloc monograph and museum exhibition. The first chair emerged midcentury, devil spawn of a noble heritage. Today, some fear the monobloc population rivals or exceeds that of humans. Some view the chair as art, others see their place in history, but I agree with the wag who dubs them tupperware containers for lard butts.
posted by madamjujujive on Aug 2, 2005 - 20 comments

Upstart travel sites challenge the big three Catering to skinflints who can't be bothered to check multiple sites for the best fares, travel aggregator sites like Mobissimo, CheapFlights, Qixo, or Sidestep allow you to search Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity with a single query, as well as bargain airlines like JetBlue and Southwest, which aren't covered by the big three. (note: Sidestep requires a download, and only works on Windows; the others are all just regular websites.) But maybe you'd be best off just heading straight to an obscure Belgian travel site.
posted by yankeefog on Dec 13, 2004 - 13 comments

Friday night is date night.
posted by oh posey on Aug 13, 2004 - 16 comments

It seems evident that here we all too aware of these, but just in case you're knee-deep in a flame war: conversational cheap shots.
posted by xmutex on Jul 22, 2004 - 24 comments

The Educator's Bed and Breakfast Network Lodging for US $34 per couple per night, and breakfast too! Required - a house of your own (or maybe a large apartment, I suppose) to host fellow members. Membership costs $35 per year with a one-time $10 initial registration fee. "Educators" is a broad category which includes teachers of all sorts, writers, journalists, researchers, librarians, probably DJ's....many bloggers...
posted by troutfishing on Jul 14, 2004 - 5 comments

Do you have problems finding the cheapest flight? Well so do computers.
Carl de Marcken, the man who created the engine behind Orbitz and other travel search engines posits that finding the cheapest fare from one point to another is a NP-Hard problem. Even if you fix the specific route between destinations there can be as many as 10³⁶ combinations.
posted by patrickje on Dec 9, 2002 - 18 comments

Dr Venter says he will be able to provide an individual's genome on a CD in about a week for $712,000 (£400,000) from later this year with the ultimate goal to sequence someone's entire genome in 24 hours for $1,000 (£562).
posted by nasim on Sep 23, 2002 - 9 comments

Speed of light broken with basic lab kit. Physicists at Middle Tennessee State University report that they've broken the speed of light using only $500 in off-the-shelf equipment that can be set up in less than an hour. Don't expect warp drives any time soon, but this does open up a cool area of science to the "two guys in a garage" arena. Is there a Jobs & Wozniak out there who will kick start a transportation revolution?
posted by mkultra on Sep 17, 2002 - 22 comments

Rabbits with big pointy teeth are on my list of gifts for friends this holiday season. What other cool gifts are there that you can get for under $50?
posted by fleener on Dec 13, 2001 - 23 comments

Ebay just gets weirder and weirder Going cheap, at only a fiver! Bargain, eh?
posted by metaxa on Dec 11, 2001 - 30 comments