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We’ve all been there: You find the perfect product, the chair or skin cream that will solve all your problems through the liberal application of capitalism—but it doesn’t fit into your budget. You have three choices: You can spend the next few months (years?) saving diligently toward the glorious day when you can afford to pull the trigger; you can put that purchase on a credit card and deal with the interest charges—or you can find a dupe.

Dupes—short for “duplicates”—are having their moment. While knockoffs are nothing new, as anyone who has ever bought a “designer” handbag on the streets of New York City can attest, dupes are a little different. Knockoffs are trying to fool people that they’re the name-brand product, but dupes are their own thing—they’re not pretending to be the expensive item, they just replicate its look and function at a lower price point.

Finding dupes can be as easy as a Google image search or a quick trip to Target or Lidl—but it can sometimes be a challenge. Thankfully, there are a variety of apps you can use that make locating dupes a lot easier, and companies that make their own dupes for specific items.

How to scour the web for dupes

If you’re looking for duplicate furniture and housewares, you could spend hours digging through subreddits and Facebook pages, but luckily there tools and sites that make it a lot easier. Some of the most useful include:

• TikTok. The social media behemoth is kind of dupe central these days. You can type the name of what you’re looking for with hashtags like #dupe or #dupefinder to see what’s out there. What’s good about using TikTok is that most of the results will show people actually using and discussing the dupes, which can help you figure out if they’re truly worth buying.

• Dupe.com has been getting a lot of press of late thanks to the love it gets from social media. Its interface is pretty simple: You paste in the URL of an item (furniture, housewares, or clothing) or drag an image into the search bar, and Dupe searches the internet for lookalikes. For example, if you want an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman from Herman Miller—which sells for anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 new—Dupe.com quickly leads you to Walmart, where you can buy this leather lounge chair with a very similar look and vibe. (There’s also an app.)

• Spoken.io works very similarly: Paste in a URL or drag/upload a photo, and it will scan the web and point you to a list of discounted dupes. For example, it turned up this $1,899 Eames-like chair—not quite as cheap as the Walmart version, but still a significant savings over the original.

• Dupeshop focuses on skincare and makeup products, and it doesn’t just point you at purchase links—it pulls together detailed comparisons, reviews, videos, and other information so you can feel confident that the dupe product will perform as expected.

• SkinSkool distinguishes itself by offering a list of potential dupes organized by a similarity score and labeled with a dollar sign icon indicating how expensive the dupe is. This makes it easy to cross-reference your budget with the available options. The site explicitly states that it bases its choices solely on the publicly available ingredient lists of the products, so it doesn’t offer any kind of hands-on review.

A few companies that make their own dupes

Some companies have made a name for themselves because they make and sell their own high-quality dupes, so you don’t have to search the entire internet trying to find them. A few examples include:

• Brandefy was founded to exploit the fact that name-brand beauty and skincare products at every price point are largely manufactured in the same facilities using the same ingredients. It creates “inspired by” products that are often indistinguishable from the pricier versions. Brandefy is more oriented toward its app than the website, however, so it’s a good choice if you want to check something on your phone while you’re out shopping.

• The Essence Vault and Dossier both offer up perfume dupes. Perfumes are expensive to develop, to manufacture, and to package—but you can’t actually copyright a fragrance, so dupe perfumes tend to be uncannily like the expensive brand they’re copying. That being said, you may notice a quality difference between the good stuff and the dupes. But if your budget is dupe-sized, both The Essence Vault and Dossier offer scents explicitly inspired by designer fragrances (Dossier also sells their own original scents).

• Element Brooklyn offers soaps, lotions, and other products that dupe brands like Aesop or Le Labo with an environmentally friendly twist: Its products are refillable, so you aren’t dumping plastic bottles into landfills all the time.

• Quince takes the same approach as Brandefy, but for clothing, claiming to use the same factories and manufacturers as the high-end luxury brands it’s replicating.

• Italic is a Los Angeles-based company that sells clothing, jewelry, and accessories that closely resemble luxury brands. Its prices aren’t as low as literal dupes, but you can still find fashion that looks just like the top-tier brands at a much lower cost.

Some caveats to keep in mind

Keep in mind that it can be difficult to judge whether a dupe is going to be worth buying even at a drastically lower price point. It can be very difficult to tell from a photo whether a piece of furniture or clothing is going to be anywhere near the quality of the real thing, for example. That’s where apps like TikTok that offer endorsements from folks who have actually used the dupes can be super valuable.

Another option for doing your dupe due diligence on beauty and skincare products is SkinSort, which has a useful comparison tool. You can compare a dupe to the brand it’s replicating and SkinSort will show you a list of ingredients in each (along with explanations for what each does) and reviews from people who have actually used the dupe.

Finally, if you want to save some money without risking a downgraded experience, you can also look for name-brand items at secondhand places like Poshmark, which sells clothes, skincare, perfume, and beauty products. A lot of sellers on these platforms have access to name-brand stuff (some work for retailers where they get deep discounts, giving them room for resell profits, for example—look for folks who have a lot of a specific product on hand and you’re probably looking at a hustling sales associate) and you can find some real bargains that way. This gives you the main benefit of a dupe (lower prices) without compromising in any way.

Washington, D.C. Feb. 25, 2025 — U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins today directed the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to immediately clarify and enforce all rules restricting its beneficiaries to U.S. citizens and legal residents only. This Secretarial directive enforces President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order of February 19th, 2025, ensuring taxpayer resources are not used to incentivize or support illegal immigration.

It’s not surprising at this point to find out that a company you entrusted your data to turned around and sold it without your knowledge or consent—as antivirus provider Avast did for years through its software and browser extensions. And while monetary compensation doesn’t undo the potential damage, nearly 3.7 million Avast customers are eligible for a refund for the trouble.

Last year, Avast reached a $16.5 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which includes compensation for users who bought Avast software between August 2014 and January 2020. The FTC found that the company collected information on religious beliefs, health concerns, political leanings, financial status, and location without user consent and sold it through a subsidiary (also without consent).

Now, customers can start to claim refunds from the settlement. According to the FTC, customers eligible for a refund from Avast will be notified via email between Feb. 24 and March 7. The notice will include a claim ID—you’ll need this to complete the Avast settlement claim form online. If you want more information about the process or need help filling out the application, you can call the refund administrator at 866-290-0165.

Your claim must be filed by June 5, 2025 to be eligible for a payment. The FTC expects to mail payments in 2026, and the amount will depend on how many people apply for refunds.

More social platforms are increasingly axing third-party fact checking as a control against misinformation in favor of user-generated notes on existing content. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to cut fact-checking programs on Meta platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—and replace them with Community Notes, which add corrections and context to posts that are “confusing or potentially misleading.”

A similar feature launched on Twitter in January 2021 as the Birdwatch program, which was rebranded as Community Notes and expanded after Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022. Community Notes exist in lieu of the ability to report misleading content on X. Musk has both praised the feature as “awesome” and said he is “working to fix” it. X users can still apply to contribute their own notes.

YouTube has also tested a community notes feature that allows users to add context to videos on the platform. Those who meet eligibility criteria can sign up for the program’s waitlist in the YouTube mobile app (under Profile > Settings > General > Help inform viewers).

When Community Notes are submitted on Meta’s platforms by approved contributors, other approved contributors have to agree that the context is helpful before the note is actually published on a post (though the threshold for what constitutes a “helpful” note isn’t clear). According to Meta’s FAQ, Community Notes will be phased in and visible to users across its apps “over the next few months.”

How to sign up to write Meta Community Notes

As of this writing, Meta has a waitlist for users to be notified once the Community Notes beta launches. You can join the waitlist via Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. Only U.S.-based users are eligible, and you must be over 18, have an account that is older than 6 months and in good standing, and have either a verified phone number or two-factor authentication set up on your account.