Postabon – helping you save money in cities

A new web service that could make city living a bit cheaper is doing well in New York. Set to roll out to London and other big cities, it’s called Postabon (tagline: shop. save. share) and it’s worth a look around.

Postabon shows you where you can find deals and discounts near you. Categorised into Eat; Entertainment; Shop; and Miscelleaneous, the offers are uploaded by users and can be anything from a free massage in a local beauty parlour to an 80% sale in a branch of Mango.

You can filter the results by proximity to you, by the type of offer (food or clothes) or by a keyword (beer) for example.

If you know of any offers going you can list them yourself, set the expiry date and use the auto-address function to find the right address for the shops or café it applies to.

Letting anyone list an offer has the advantage of spreading the site’s reach and information. It has the disadvantage that not all offers can be proved as 100% accurate or reliable. Seems to be a risk Postabon is willing to take and I think they’re right: a comprehensive list is going to be so much more useful than a much smaller number of carefully vetted ones.

On this point though – I’m already starting to think of hilarious fake offers: free massage in the post office (LOL!) free iphone with every pot of jam purchased at M&S (LMAO! etc). However that’s just my bad inner netizen getting out of control and since you have to have an online identity on the site, it would reduce the likeliehood of people arsing around.

It’s possible to vote on offers: thumbs up or thumbs down to add a bit of peer reviewed benchmarking to the site. And of course you could always confirm by ringing a shop or checking a club’s website.

I hope it gets to the UK before the sales start in January.. It’s available on a computer from www.postabon.com, and on mobiles as well – as an iPhone app and as a mobile site for phones with browsers.

Watch their explanatory video:

[via Mashable]