One of the many things I delay all too often in my life is replacing air filters in my home a/c unit. They’re out of sight, out mind, and not exactly the most attractive item to purchase. It had probably been 9 months since I replaced mine, when I noticed it wasn’t getting cool in my house and the a/c was chugging hard. I opened up the closet door to my condo a/c unit and found a dirty filter with ice on it. Fuck. Time for new filters. I turned the a/c system off and zipped to Lowes. The aisle of air filters wasn’t exactly consumer friendly. There’s several different brands of filters, with different certifications, specifications, ratings and prices, all trying to grab your attention. Gold, red, 1085, 3m – I had not clue wtf it all meant. It was kind of like one of those tacky, old school, gas stations with colorful ads plastered all over that make little effect on your purchasing decisions. I consciously though about buying a bunch of them, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it for a while, but with no idea of what anything meant, what the differences were between them all, or what I needed, I grabbed the 3 pack for $11. It was the paradox of choice at its finest.
I kind of like to take care of things, and my A/C system is new (like 9 months old lol), so I wasn’t convinced that $3 air filters were up to par, and I wanted to order in bulk so I wouldn’t have to buy air filters for a long long time.
When I got home, I hit Amazon. The mess of choices, and pricepoints was just as confusing as the home improvement store so logically I went to Google for some education.
A few minutes later I found Filterbuy. Filterbuy’s website lets you select your size, and then the type and quantity you need. Rather than having a dozen different choices, like you have on the aisle in the home improvement store, you have 4 choices based on MERV rating, which the website explains the differences between. It seems, that like many other things, there’s a lot of marketing hype in front of it all and once you pull away the baloney, its relatively straight forward.
Filterbuy gives you price breaks on quantity so 1 filter might be $19.95 but an order of 6 is $5.95 per filter. They also give you an option get it set up on auto delivery, so you get them at intervals as you need them. There are competitors in the airfilter subscription space, like FilterEasy but you must do a subscription — no one off orders. Call me old school but I’m not too into the auto delivery thing, I like to pay, and have a stockpile, so I bought 6 of them.
While it certainly isn’t a radical new tech platform, Filterbuy takes a relatively complex and unfriendly purchasing process, and makes it clear, simple, and consumer friendly.