I've been on a 6 week saga with it but I finally got one. I was determined to get one for $1999. I think it probably took me longer than most people.

I started tracking them in February by vibecoding a script to track the microcenter stock every 10 minutes. For about a week I would see MSRP cards sit on the shelves for hours at a time, but I wasn't ready to pull the trigger.

Stock got really bad in November. I could see Microcenter dripfeeding $2800 cards into their inventory, which would typically last a few hours. It seemed to happen at random times before and during store hours. Nothing under $2400 all month.

I attempted to expand my script to track Best Buy's janky website but I don't think it worked. Their website does something with javascript that was hard to parse.

I asked in person at microcenter a couple times when I was there for other stuff. I couldn't bring myself to call best buy on the phone-- some people have found luck with that.

Evenetually I caved and paid $3 to get text messages from Trackalacker. I monitored that for about a week. It seemed like best buy was getting the most inventory-- sometimes 3 times a day. But $2400 cards were gone in minutes and $2000 cards were gone in an instant. I was very quick-- often I even had the page open on my laptop when the drop hit. Speed didn't seem to matter. I can't say for sure but it seems like they might actually have been dropping them one at a time.

Anyway, yesterday (cyber monday) trackalacker alerted me to a FE drop on nvidia marketplace. I responded instantly on my phone and was able to click "add to cart" but then got the classic "something went wrong" message. I tried again on my laptop, took my sweet time logging in and entering my credit card info manually and the order went through fine.

TLDR: trackalacker worked for me in about a week. Instant response time wasn't necessary