This ^

I just saw your post and totally get the struggle with the tight budget. I went through this exact same thing recently when I was hunting for a new monitor and felt super paranoid about getting scammed or overpaying. I have been really satisfied with using PayPal Honey lately. Since it is owned by a big company like PayPal, it feels a lot safer to install on my browser than some of the more obscure trackers out there. It works well and I have no complaints about how it catches price drops. A couple of quick tips that worked for me:

• Grab the Honey browser extension because it does the work automatically when you land on the page.
• Check out Glass It if you want something that looks at other stores too, just in case a better deal pops up at Best Buy or somewhere else. Honestly, the best part about Honey is that it is completely free and actually shows you a chart of the price history right there on the Amazon page. It isnt quite as data-heavy as Keepa, which is actually a plus if you just want to know if the current price is a ripoff or not, tbh. Definitely look at Amazon Renewed for MacBooks too... you can usually find an M1 or M2 Air for way under 900 bucks and they come with a decent warranty for peace of mind. I was pretty happy with my renewed purchase last year. Good luck with your design classes!

Commenting to find later