I say this with the faith that there are no serial killers reading this right now, but I’ve never been big on home security. I didn’t even own a key to my house growing up—there was no need; we never locked our doors. But now that I’m a big girl living in New York City, I’ve realized, locking doors actually may be a good thing??? Plus, I’ve been testing various pet cameras for the past few months and they really are handy. It’s nice to know what’s going on inside your house while you’re not in it. Plus, I love being a helicopter cat mom and spying on my fur babies (and tossing them treats while away!). My favorite pet cam right now is above—it has nearly 360 degree viewing capabilities, two-way audio, and the ability to feed from your phone. Plus, it’s only $70—a super good value for a camera of this caliber.

We get it. We don’t want to be as reliant on Amazon as we are either. (You probably feel the same way.) Well, we’ve done the legwork for you, scouring other online retailers for their very best deals. We’ve found laptops, phones, earbuds, smart rings, and more (for less).

I’ve spent the last few months testing various chef’s knives, and there actually is quite a lot to know in order to pick the right one for you. I really love this knife from Global. The ergonomically-shaped slender handle with divots makes it easy to grip (and provides more control while cutting). This knife feels really lightweight because the handle is actually hollow and filled with sand, which just barely offsets the weight of the blade. It’s super easy to use, and isn’t too intimidating for first-time Fancy Knife users. Plus it’s $60 off right now.

Yes, this is an expensive lamp. But it’s gorgeous, is smartly designed, and is multi-functional. I’ve had it on my bedside for almost a year. The lamp emits a nice glow and can get bright, and there’s a sliding lever at the top you can smoothly flip to control brightness. You can angle the light various ways, not just to direct light but also because it’s a mirror!

The base is a Qi wireless charger that can recharge your phone overnight, and you can use the metal rod above it to prop up your phone when it doesn’t need to charge. This is a great desk lamp if you need to make sure there’s no broccoli in your teeth before a Zoom call, but it also works well on the nightstand. This is the best deal I’ve seen on it.

I’ve tried a lot of smart speakers and displays, and the Echo Spot (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a funny in-between of the two. While it’s an unexpected combination of features—you can see the weather on screen when you ask for it or the song name you’re playing, for example, but you won’t be able to watch shows or join video calls—it actually felt like a perfect amount of display to voice ratio. I use these gadgets for a living, but I don’t love using smart displays as my streaming device or a video calling gadget, so having the little screen that can just show me minimal info was a fun detail without being distracting or too many features I’ll never use.

I do miss being able to control my smart home with a tap of my finger, but the Echo Spot works just as well as any other smart speaker to quickly voice command your lights on. Plus, unlike the Echo Shows, there’s no camera in the device, making it a good privacy choice.

Like other Amazon devices, it gets steeply discounted for Prime Day, and is just $45, a discount of 44%.

I talk about this at length in my guide to the Best Kitchen Composters, but did you know that most electric household “composters” just grind and dry food scraps and don’t actually make compost? The Reencle Prime doesn’t make fully developed compost either, but it comes the closest out of any of the major commercially available brands. Just throw your food scraps in what’s basically a trash can filled with microbes and let them go to work, sift out the larger pieces, and cure the result with some potting soil. Voila! You’ve got dirt. The Reencle isn’t often on sale, so if you’ve been eyeing one of these—or you live in an area where you’ll be fined for not separating food waste—you might want to consider taking the plunge while it’s 20 percent off.

There was a little revolution in the juice world during this millennium. Juicers got… slow. This doesn’t mean they juice much more slowly, but that the actual juicing machinery moves more slowly—kinda like an old-fashioned cider press. The Nama J2 Cold Press Juicer, my favorite juicer of all juicers, churns up fruit at a mere 50 rpm. That means its auger turns less than once a second. Blender-style juicers, which fling fruit bits at a screen, might have rpms measurable in the thousands.

This Nama might take three or four minutes to blend up a 2-liter hopper full of fruit, which isn’t overly long, but it does so a bit more efficiently: It squeezes more juice. The pulp is less wet. Some believe in nebulous health benefits of slow juice versus fast juice which is harder to say. What’s true is that, to me, the juice that has been masticated slowly tastes a bit better and richer, wrung from more components of the fruit—and certainly, slow juicers uses more of the fruit. For soft greens, there’s no comparison: slow juicers squeeze a lot more juice out.

But if slow juicers make better juice, they also generally cost hundreds of dollars. Which means it’s always best to wait for the big sales. This is the biggest discount I’ve seen on the Nama J2 this year: It’s more than $100 off.

Like the furever favorite Chom Chom Roller Pet Hair Remover ($25) which we just blogged about this simple tool from Uproot Clean easily pulls up hair embedded on carpet and other fabrics. As with the rest of Uproot Clean’s line, which focuses on pet hygiene from brushes to grooming tools, this little tool acts like a rake, effortlessly pulling up fur that’s regularly naked to the human eye. All you have to do is scrape the tool in various directions, and it uses teeny tiny slits in the rake head to grab hair that even the best pet hair vacuums couldn’t suck up. I use this little tool almost daily—it’s super lightweight and small, so I’ve put it in an easily identifiable place so I can easily go back to it. Now on sale for $16, this is a small investment with a big payoff.

Branch Basics makes my second-favorite sustainable cleaning starter kit. This bundle from Amazon includes empty glass bottles, plus a giant container of cleaning concentrate. That concentrate can be diluted down into various cleaning solutions for glass, floors, counters, laundry, and other surfaces. It’s unscented, which some folks might like, but you can add essential oils to perfume the product if you want. You’ll also get a pouch of Oxygen Boost powder which adds cleaning power to the task at hand. The formula is safe for kids and pets, and free from preservatives, fragrances, dyes, bleach, and ammonia.

If there’s ever been a more guilt-free purchase than JLab’s latest ultra-budget buds, I haven’t found it. Seriously, anytime you can get decent sound and some modest noise canceling for $30 or less, you’re winning. The Go Pop ANC buds don’t stop there, offering some solid features like an app with EQ options and even multipoint pairing to connect to two devices at once.

You may not need buds this cheap, and we can recommend plenty of higher quality noise canceling buds, but if you’ve got a youth on your list, want some throwaway buds, or you’re just dipping your toes in the wireless waters, these buds will keep the worries at bay because, well, they’re damn-near free.

Anyone even tangentially related to retail should admit it: Prime Day was a very good idea.

I am old enough to remember when the obvious effort to get shoppers spending opposite the holiday season was awkwardly branded as “Christmas in July.” Kmart and Sears were still doing it in the early Obama years.

I don’t know about the war on regular Christmas, but the war on Christmas in July was a bloodbath won by Amazon—the phrase now only seems to exist within the cinnamon-scented world of The Hallmark Channel. July is now Prime Day season, and every retailer that is not Amazon is cast as a “competitor deal.”

But deals they do have. Including 27 from Walmart that we like at least as well as the Prime ones.

I’m testing a couple of options for an upcoming guide to hand fans, and I admit I was not expecting to like this periscope-shaped “powerful turbo air tube” as much as I do. The design won both a Red Dot and iF Design award this year, and it’s true that the curved shape is unexpectedly satisfying to hold and use. The fan is heavy enough to feel high-quality but not cumbersome, there are no rotors or blades to knock into, and it has an unexpectedly strong airflow at 807 feet per minute on high. This is only half as strong as the Jisulife Ultra2, which is so strong as to be almost ridiculous, but still quite respectable. It doesn’t double as a flashlight or phone charger, as some of these hand fans do, but it does come with a nifty velvet carrying case and optional strap for carrying.

Are you a coffee paste person? You might be! Several people are—mostly ultralight backpackers.

I am not. Or at least I don’t think I am based on three cups made with this Swiss startup’s unique product. The only flavor is bitterness, and it turns a weird grey color with a splash of milk. But then again, I have so far only tested it in my kitchen against a delicious AeroPress cup and not in the wild after carrying its 5 ounces for 15 miles up and down hills.

I do not want to reveal too many of our top-secret editorial plans to competitors, but Scott Gilbertson and I have been talking about ways to assess saving weight when backpacking, which is why I bought and tested this. With the tube weighing just 4.76 ounces when full with 20 servings, it’s going to save you at least half a pound. The tube is sturdy, it’s dead simple to use, and my opinion might change sitting around a campfire.

Mostly, though, I am mad that I paid $20 for my tube when Prime Day has it priced at $13. For all the “Prime Day deals aren’t real” people on Blue Sky Dot Com: I had this product sitting in my cart for two months, and it never dropped below $20 until now. For $13, this is definitely worth trying on a backpacking trip.

Is there a feeling you can’t shake in the back of your head: you left the stove on, or a hair straightener on, and you spend the entire day waiting for the call that your house burned down? Or perhaps that you left the front door wide open and your pets will have wandered outside to be eaten by a rogue werewolf at two in the afternoon? (My imagination can’t be stopped, my friends.)

My husband and I both struggle with this, and as forgetful parents, have found ourselves again and again culpable of leaving the garage door open. Thank goodness we have the MyQ Smart Garage Door Opener (8/10, WIRED Recommends). I can check the app anytime to see if I have once again caused my own fears to come true.

Usually, the best options for getting a deal on a Dyson is to snag an older model without all the latest bells and whistles.

But this Prime Day has an absolute gem on sale: our favorite Dyson stick vacuum is $180 off, and the lowest price we’ve tracked it since Black Friday.

The Dyson V15 Detect is a fantastic all-around vacuum that’s crazy powerful. I vacuum regularly since I test all kinds of cordless vacuums, and the V15 still managed to pull up dust and cat hair from deep within my carpet after weeks of vacuuming with weaker options. It’s no joke how much more powerful a Dyson is, and the V15 is a great all-around choice for carpet, rugs, stairs, and even hard floors. You’ll pry mine out of my cold, dead hands, and you should take this chance to get your own, since it’s not often a current Dyson is available for a great sale price.

Stress sweat is the worst smell in the world, but my trusty top aluminum-free deodorant is preventing me from dealing with it this week. I’ve tried 16 natural deodorants so far, and Native has been my top pick from day one. I’ve been wearing it since 2020, and I always go back to it. It smells amazing, even after a day of working out or dancing in the blazing hot sun, and it doesn’t stain my clothes. And while aluminum isn’t actually harmful, if you prefer deodorant to antiperspirant, this is an option worth checking out. It’s vegan, and uses tapioca starch and baking soda for absorption (though if your skin is sensitive, there are baking-soda-free formulas too.)

The ChomChom roller is a perennial Prime Day top-seller (it is again this year, though it’s not doing Premier Protein Shake numbers) and I think it’s safe to say that every cat owner on the WIRED Reviews desk loves it. It’s beyond easy to use. Just roll the remover back and forth across an upholstered surface or carpet, and be amazed at how much pet hair it gathers. It’s easy to empty, too. You’ll be marveling at the sheer amount of hair it collects. The best part is, unlike traditional lint rollers, this thing is infinitely reusable—I’ve owned mine for five years and counting, and it’s still going strong just like it did when it first arrived.

I try to defer to the people who review Bluetooth speakers for WIRED instead of going rogue with my own opinions, but I was sent this device as a possible inclusion in our guide to the best gifts for dads, and it wowed me. It’s very hefty and feels like you could use it as a battering ram to bust into a house at this very time of morning—the handle is wide and comfortable enough to make that work. The Blast is loud but relatively clear at high volume and has intuitive controls and an outrageous 30 hours of battery life. It’s $50 off for Prime Day, though the price has historically dropped to this level or a little lower for a few days every month or so.

We have a fresh update to our list of our favorite pieces of gear under $100, including our top curling iron pick for people with long hair and Fitbit’s cheapest tracker.

Electrolyte powders can come in handy whether you’re sweating on the treadmill or nursing a headache from a late night out. Liquid I.V. is the best I’ve tried so far for most use-case scenarios.

Dietitians say the most important components of an electrolyte powder are sodium, carbohydrates, and sugar. This mix has a good balance of all three without being too heavy-handed, and with 20 different flavors to choose from, there’s bound to be an option that sounds good to you.

I haven’t yet tried a flavor I disliked. They’re mostly sweet, a little salty, and very drinkable. Might I recommend pairing them with fries and a Diet Coke? (Or, you know, a protein shake and a recovery massage.)