AVSForum Club Membership worth it?

April 19, 2008 3:16 AM

Is a membership in AVSForum Club worth it? I'm in the market for an HDTV and I'm wondering if it's worth the $35 subscription cost for access to the special deal forum, or if the specials posted there are similar to what I'll find looking at other sites like slickdeals, etc.
posted by longdaysjourney to Shopping (3 answers total)

My guess is that you could find the same deals with diligent searching through freely available deal sites. The question is whether it's worth paying to you to potentially save time. Are you looking to purchase this weekend, the near future, by a certain date coming up?

There are a lot of those sites out there, and I would definitely check them before ponying up the $35, but finding a specific product at a specific time can be difficult, and often with them it's a matter of going regularly and catching the good deals as they pop up. (Personally, when I was in my heyday of trolling for deals, I found that once a deal popped up on one site, it would almost immediately be found on the others. YMMV)

Can you maybe contact anyone on their forums who IS a member and get their feedback? (or is that what you're trying to do here?) I've yet to pull the trigger on an HDTV, but from what I can tell, it's more knowing your product than finding a crazy deal. Not that they need to be exclusive.

regardless, good hunting.
posted by Busithoth at 6:05 AM on April 19, 2008

The question of is it worth it would be largely a matter of chance; they might post a special which saves you $400 off a TV you want, or you could not benefit at all though, wasting your money.

I'd lean toward not paying the money; the nature of the internet in regards to these sort of things means once one site has all the rest will have it soon enough. You'd want pretty good evidence that they've posted great exclusive specials before, and have the sources/contacts within the industry to continue to post them. Otherwise, it seems like somewhat of a waste of money.
posted by oxford blue at 10:06 AM on April 19, 2008

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers, guys. I was hoping that some MeFite who was a member would respond, but perhaps the lack of such responses indicates it's not worth blowing 35 bucks on a membership. I tend to research big purchases like this to death, so it's unlikely that I'd miss a deal that was posted at open sites. The only thing that would make it worth it to me, I think, was if the closed forum had upcoming sales info with longer lead times than those other sites. Oh well, back to the research!
posted by longdaysjourney at 11:11 AM on April 19, 2008