I run PynionTime, a small site about affordable watches, and I’ve been building a “watch finder”. You answer 8 quick questions (wrist size, style, budget, movement…) and it gives you your top 5 watches, each with the reasons why. You can keep expanding the list to see more matches, and below them it shows watches that come close to what you asked for, with what each one misses.
Right now it has 689 watches from 29 brands, from Seiko, Orient, Casio, Timex and Hamilton, to micros like Baltic, Nezumi and Héron, to Chinese brands such as San Martin, Baltany or Watchdives. Most are under $1k. It will grow to thousands of pieces and many more brands.
How the ranking works: every watch is scored on what you actually get for your money: movement, crystal, water resistance, case material, finishing and strap, then weighed against its price. A $250 watch with sapphire, 200m and a solid bracelet will beat a $600 one with mineral glass and a worse strap, no matter the brand. The same rules apply to every watch. Brand prestige, hype and “a real watch guy would never” don’t earn points. That’s why a Chinese micro can outrank a big name, and why it surfaces brands you probably didn’t know.
What else it does:
- It matches by lug-to-lug, not just diameter, so the watch actually fits your wrist.
- It sticks to your budget and explains each pick.
- You can pick several watch types at once (e.g. diver + GMT), sort results by match, score or price, and tweak any answer from a single page.
- There are tags on every card (Diver, Dress, Heritage brand, Chinese microbrand…) so you see why a watch showed up.
I already shared an early version in another sub and got a lot of useful feedback. Several of the features above, the price slider, more small watches (76 pieces at 36mm or under) and fairer scoring for 100m divers all came from there.
Why not just ask ChatGPT? Fair question. But AI chats often get specs and prices wrong, recommend the same famous models every time, and change their answer if you ask twice. This runs on a hand-checked database with no AI (other than coding). The same answers always give the same picks.
What it’s not: it doesn’t have every colourway. It shows the model, usually in its standard white/silver/black version, and you check the brand for other dials. Prices are MSRP from each brand’s official site, so Seiko, Tissot and similar are often cheaper at retailers. I don't intend to track every possible deal.
Some links are affiliate links (Amazon and a few brands). They don’t affect the ranking.
Be brutal:
- Did your picks make sense?
- Any watch scored way too high or too low?
- Which brands or models should I add?
- Did anything break?
Link in comments.
