Update: Ironically something which also launched today was dealspl.us from the founder of BensBargains which essentially does in the exact same thing as Dealplumber (or vice-versa). I won't be writing about dealspl.us but I thought it was worth a mention.
Launching today is Santa Clara-based Dealplumber, which aims to help users save money by helping them find deals and coupons through a community-driven model. As a consumer looking to save a few bucks on the new watch you're planning to buy from Amazon, you can use Dealplumber to find the appropriate coupon code (if there's any), and as someone looking to make a few bucks for a Friday-night dinner, you can help buyers achieve that by contributing and posting deals/coupons with your affiliate ID attached.
Clipfire which launched back in January does essentially the same thing, although with more of an emphasis on giving users the most popular deals as voted upon rather than helping them find one for essentially most of the things they buy — a good analogy would be the difference between something like digg where the focus is on the popularity and importance of a story and say an ordinary tech publication where the focus is on providing users with a range of stories.
I think as a new startup in this timeframe, Dealplumber have got a lot of things right. For starters they've made the RSS feeds significantly visible in places, plan to launch an API soon (which is great to see), have a reasonable UI and interface, and they've given contributers a good incentive to contribute. If I was someone looking for deals I'd go there and if I was someone looking to give people deals in return for a tiny share then I'd certainly go there, so there's something in it for everyone.
Where I might start to doubt something like Dealplumber is in their business model. How big is this space, really, and can any, if at all, money be made? It really comes down to giving both parties a good incentive but drawing a line at where you plan to get you get your share of things. Currently they've monetized themselves by things like AdSense and such, although with their kind of 'focused' users I'm not sure they'll manage to attact the clicks they might need to survive.
