Home › CigarCraig Special Edition: Cigarfinder.com Reintroduction, a Primer
CigarCraig Special Edition: Cigarfinder.com Reintroduction, a Primer
Two years ago I welcomed CigarFinder to the sidebar in a post that was mostly about a cigar case and a pig roast at the Wooden Indian. Two sentences, easy to miss. Then I mostly left them alone, which is my fault and not theirs. Cigarfinder tracks what 20 US online shops charge for the same cigar and lines the prices up next to each other, ranked by what each one works out to per cigar. It's a very handy tool!
How much do cigar prices vary between online stores?
More than most smokers assume. Across cigars carried by more than one shop, the same line swings about 28 percent between the cheapest store and the dearest. On a box of 20 that works out to a median difference of about $22, and an active sitewide coupon code is worth roughly $31 more on top. The received wisdom in this hobby is that prices are set by the manufacturer and therefore much the same everywhere, and the numbers do not support it.
The catalogue now runs past 100,000 live listings across those 20 retailers, next to a directory of more than 3,000 lounges, shops and bars around the country.
The index recomputes every week from the full catalogue, so the gap is measured rather than estimated. For anyone who buys by the box, 28 percent is the difference between a good year and an expensive one.
Price per cigar, line by line
Individual lines have their own pages. The Montecristo White Series price page ranks every listing it finds by price per cigar, singles and packs and boxes together, so the cheapest option is visible without arithmetic. The Padron 1964 Anniversary price page does the same for a line where the gap between shops tends to be wide, as does the Rocky Patel Vintage 1990 price page.
Price history, alerts and deals
Each product page also carries a 30 day price history. A drop can be judged against what the cigar has genuinely been selling for rather than against a crossed out number, which is a different question from the one most sale pages answer. A price alert can be set on any listing, so the next move gets reported rather than missed.
The deals feed works on the same principle. A price is published only when it beats every other store on the site, or when it beats that listing's own 30 day history, and every published price is rechecked daily. There is an AI cigar advisor as well. A plain English description works as the input, something along the lines of a medium bodied Connecticut for the morning under ten dollars, and it answers with cigars and the cheapest place to buy each one. It is free and takes no signup.
A few honest limits
A few honest limits. The site covers US online retailers, so there are no Cubans in it. It cannot price the humidor at a local shop, which is where plenty of cigars are better bought anyway. Prices move because the stores move them, so a figure seen on Sunday is not a promise for Monday. And it will not say which cigar is worth smoking, which remains the job of the people who actually smoke them.
What it does is answer a question most cigar smokers carry around unanswered: whether the box in the cart is a fair price, or just the first price. CigarFinder answers that in about the time it takes to type the name of the cigar.
That's all for today, until the next time,
CigarCraig