How we verify promo codes

The short version: a code only earns a green “working” badge on Clipper after the store's own checkout accepts it. We get that answer one of two ways. A crew member carries the code through the checkout by hand, or our bot builds a cart at the store's live checkout and reads what the store says. Every proof is labeled with which way it happened. Codes we found but haven't proven are labeled untried. Codes that failed go to a published graveyard instead of quietly disappearing. And when a proof gets old, the label says so. A code last proven 70 days ago will tell you it may have expired, because pretending otherwise would be lying with a green checkmark.

Where codes come from

Our agents hunt continuously: newsletters we subscribe to with our own inboxes, brands' own pages, and live searches run at the moment you paste a product link. Every code enters the vault as untried. Found isn't the same as working, and we never blur that line.

What counts as proof

A checkout. The store's own register has to accept the code. There are two ways we get that answer, and we always show you which one we used.

🧾 Crew checkout. A crew member carries the code to the store's actual cart, applies it, and records what happened: pass or fail, and the measured discount if it passed. That record is the receipt. It's our strongest proof, because it's a person seeing exactly what you'd see.

⚔ Machine-proven. For stores whose checkout we can read automatically, our bot puts one item in a cart at the store's live checkout, applies the code, and reads whether the store accepted it and how much it took off. It never enters payment details and never places an order. A pass turns the badge green, but the code's page says machine-proven, not crew-proven, so you can weigh it yourself. Stores we can't read this way wait on crew receipts.

Whichever way a receipt was filed, the newest one sets the status. If the bot passes a code today and a crew member's checkout fails it tomorrow, the code is dead. Each code's page shows its receipts, who or what filed each one, and the date of its last successful proof. One receipt from last week beats ten claims of “verified today” from sites that tested nothing.

Freshness, honestly labeled

Codes expire without notice, so proof decays. Our labels reflect it: proven within 3 weeks reads as fresh; within two months it still shows the proof date; past that, the green drops entirely and the label switches to last proven N days ago — may have expired, verify at checkout. We'd rather admit uncertainty than sell you a stale checkmark.

The graveyard is data

Dead codes stay published, marked dead, with the date they died. Most coupon sites hide failures because a wall of “working” codes converts better. We publish ours because the graveyard is how you know the green badges mean something.

What we refuse to do

We don't invent codes. Everything here was actually found somewhere, with a source and a date. We don't print codes we haven't seen work just to pad a page. We don't pass off a machine proof as a human one. Our bot doesn't buy anything, and it doesn't touch a checkout past the point where the store shows its total. And our outbound links never overwrite another site's affiliate credit. If you arrived from someone else's recommendation, their tag rides through untouched.

A correction

An earlier version of this page said we don't run bots against store checkouts, and that proof always meant a person at the register. That stopped being true when we added machine testing, and the page wasn't updated to match. It is now. The code pages had been labeling machine proofs all along; this page was the one that was wrong.

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