Black Friday 2026: History, data and how to buy AI tools smart

What is Black Friday, and why is it called that?

Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving, the US holiday on the fourth Thursday of November. In the US it has been the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season for decades; in Germany it has become the biggest discount day of the year over the past decade or so. Three stories about the name circulate. Only one holds up.

1869: the wrong Black Friday

On September 24, 1869, the New York gold market crashed after speculators Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to corner the gold supply. History books call that day “Black Friday” too. It has nothing to do with shopping, but people still mix them up.

Philadelphia: cops, traffic jams and a failed rebrand

The documented origin is Philadelphia. In the 1950s the city's traffic police called the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday”: thousands drove downtown to shop, and the Army–Navy football game often followed on Saturday. For officers it meant twelve-hour shifts in gridlock. According to wordorigins.org, the earliest known print use is in Women's Wear Daily on November 28, 1960, reporting record jams for “black Friday”.

Retailers disliked the gloomy label. Around 1961, the city and merchants in Philadelphia tried to rename it “Big Friday”. It didn't stick. The police slang spread slowly to other cities and showed up in national media by the mid-1970s.

“In the black”: a later reinterpretation

The best-known explanation says retailers turn a profit, go “into the black”, for the first time in the year on this day. It sounds plausible but was made up after the fact: according to wordorigins.org it only appears in the 1980s, when retail wanted to give the negative term a positive spin. Marketing didn't invent the day, it rewrote its history.

2005: Cyber Monday joins in

Shop.org, the online arm of the National Retail Federation, coined “Cyber Monday” in a November 2005 press release for the Monday after Thanksgiving. The idea: many people shopped from fast office internet after the long weekend. Today Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year in the US, bigger than Black Friday itself.

How Black Friday came to Germany

According to mydealz, Apple ran a one-day Black Friday shopping event in Germany on November 24, 2006 (mydealz press). Online retailers followed, first in electronics and fashion, later almost every sector. Since Thanksgiving isn't a holiday in Germany, the day lacked an occasion. What remained was the discount promise, and that could be stretched at will.

The trademark fight: ten years over two words

In 2013, “Black Friday” was registered as a word mark at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. In 2016, Hong Kong-based Super Union Holdings bought it and sent cease-and-desist letters to retailers using the term. Many switched to workarounds like “Black Week”. Several courts followed (CMS, LTO, IT-Recht Kanzlei):

Sources: CMS, LTO, IT-Recht Kanzlei, accessed Nov 10, 2026. Not legal advice.

Since 2023, anyone in Germany can say “Black Friday”. A habit from the cease-and-desist years stayed: one day became a week, and the week often a whole November. Add Singles' Day on 11/11, brought to Europe by Chinese platforms. For shoppers, that means there's no single day when everything is cheapest any more. The price data below shows it.

German data: growth, saturation, first decline

The key figure for Germany comes from the retail association HDE. Every year in mid-November it publishes a forecast for Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, based on a survey by IFH Köln. Note: these are forecasts, not measured sales, and they cover online and in-store.

Percentages are the HDE's own and partly compare against revised prior-year figures, so they can't be recalculated from the forecasts. 2018, 2019 and 2023 via media reports on the HDE forecast.

The curve tells a clear story: until 2022 Black Friday in Germany grew at double digits, since 2023 it has stalled just under €6 billion, and for 2025 the HDE forecast its first decline since records began in 2016. In the 2025 survey, 48% of more than 1,000 online shoppers planned to buy on Black Friday and over a third on Cyber Monday. About €1.6 billion of it was Christmas shopping brought forward.

There's no Black Friday forecast for 2026 yet (as of Nov 10, 2026). The HDE's Christmas forecast of November 3, 2026 sets the frame: retail expects nominal growth of 2% to €129.2 billion for November and December, online growth of 4.1% to €23.1 billion (HDE). Nominal means that after inflation there's little real growth left.

US data: online records, Cyber Monday on top

In the US, Adobe Analytics measures online spend from real visits to retail sites. These are measured sales, not surveys, but online only. The 2025 figures:

Other trackers draw the lines differently: Salesforce puts US online sales on Black Friday 2025 at $18B (+3%) and global at $79B (Salesforce). The National Retail Federation counted a record 202.9 million shoppers, online and in-store, over the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday (NRF).

Forecasts for 2026

Two things stand out. First, the biggest US day isn't Black Friday but Cyber Monday. Second, US online spend keeps growing 7–9% a year while Germany has stalled. One reason: in the US the Friday after Thanksgiving is a day off for many, and the long weekend is a fixed part of the calendar. Black Friday is a ritual there, a discount campaign in Germany.

US vs. Germany: side by side

The two countries' figures aren't directly comparable: Adobe measures US online spend, the HDE forecasts German sales across all channels. With that caveat, the picture is still clear. The per-capita figures are our own calculation.

Population: US Census (341.8M, Jul 1, 2025), Destatis (83.3M, Jun 30, 2026). The German figures include in-store sales, the US ones don't, so the comparison clearly understates the US.

Per capita, the two are closer than the headlines suggest. But the US number counts online only, the German one includes stores. Add US stores and the gap would be large. The real difference is direction: the US keeps growing, Germany doesn't.

Are the discounts real? What price data shows

Good news first: on Black Friday most things really are cheaper than before. The bad news: usually not by much, and often not at their cheapest. German price comparison site idealo tracked about 10,000 popular products from around 3,500 online shops in 100 categories from October to December 2025 (idealo study via retail-news):

• 79% of products were cheaper on Black Friday than in October.
• Only 13% were at least 20% cheaper. The average saving was 8%.
• For 52%, the lowest November price fell on a day other than Black Friday.
• No widespread price hikes beforehand: average prices fell from October to November in 68 of 100 categories.

Deal community mydealz finds something similar: about three in four products were cheaper on Black Friday 2025 than in October, but only by 7% on average (mydealz). A smaller mydealz comparison of 41 identical products found a median 6% advantage over Prime Deal Days in October; the authors themselves call it not representative (t3n).

Software is different: the 30-day rule doesn't apply

In Germany, since May 28, 2022, § 11 of the Price Indication Ordinance requires anyone advertising a price reduction on goods to show the lowest price of the previous 30 days (gesetze-im-internet.de). The wording says “goods”. A software subscription or AI tool is a service or digital service. Our reading (not legal advice): SaaS plans aren't covered. A “−70%” on an AI tool can refer to a list price nobody ever paid. In the US, the FTC's pricing guides are guidance rather than a fixed 30-day rule.

Work out the true price yourself

So with AI tools, do the maths: twelve months with the deal against twelve months without. Example with four partner offers on i4u.business (prices checked on the vendors' pricing pages on Nov 10, 2026, USD plus tax, monthly billing, our calculation):

Prices: julius.ai (Plus $20/month, $16 billed annually), fabric.so (Pro $18/month billed annually; assumption: discount applies to that amount), fyxer.com (Pro $49 monthly, $37 annually), granola.ai (Business $14 per user). Deals per partner program. Ad: I earn a commission on these tools.

The pattern is clear: intro discounts save roughly 4 to 10% over a year. The regular annual plan with no promotion at all saves 20% on Julius and 24% on Fyxer. If you'll use a tool for a year, the annual plan almost always beats the discounted month. If you're unsure, the discounted month is a cheap trial, not a bargain.

Dollars, euros and VAT

• Currency: many AI tools bill in US dollars. Use the day's rate and check whether your card charges a foreign transaction fee.
• Private buyers in the EU: you usually pay your country's VAT (19% in Germany) on top of the net price a US pricing page shows.
• Businesses: with a valid VAT ID, invoices are usually issued without VAT (reverse charge) and you account for it yourself. Add the VAT ID before the first purchase; fixing it later is often a pain.

The 5 software deal types, and their catch

Lifetime deals are their own topic. The best-known marketplace, AppSumo, has scheduled its 2026 Black Friday sale for November 16 to December 1, per its own page (AppSumo). Its refund window is 60 days unless stated otherwise for a product (AppSumo terms). Many software deals bought directly from the vendor have much shorter windows or are explicitly non-refundable. Read the terms before you buy, not after.

i4u data: what our AI tool deal checks show

For the Black Friday pages on i4u.business we track 69 AI tools. Every 2026 deal is checked only on the vendor's own site, never copied from deal lists. Data as of November 9, 2026.

• 69 AI tools tracked in 13 categories
• 6 of them (9%) with a 2025 deal documented in reports
• 9 with an earlier price check in our AI news
• 7 with a 2026 deal we confirmed on the vendor's own site

We compared the 2026 deals confirmed by November 9 against the price a few weeks earlier (via the Internet Archive or earlier checks):

Source: our own checks of vendor pages, details on each tool's Black Friday page. Small sample, a pointer, not a statistic.

Of seven checked deals, one was clearly a real discount against the earlier price. For four, the actual saving was much smaller than the advertising suggested. That matches idealo's data for goods, except that with software the 30-day rule doesn't protect you.

The rules in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

If you're buying for a company, withdrawal rights, the cancellation button and monthly cancellation after renewal usually don't apply: those rules protect consumers. Only the vendor's contract terms count. Also check the data protection side: whether there's a data processing agreement, where the data is stored and whether you can opt out of training on your data. Which tool is compliant is something I can't judge for you; that belongs with your data protection adviser.

Which AI tool for what, and where there's a deal now

Task first, then tool, then price. The table shows tools we cover in depth on i4u.business, with the offer that currently applies per the partner program.

“Try” links are affiliate links (advertising): I earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Checklist: buying AI tools on Black Friday

My position: don't stock up on AI tools

Don't stock up on AI tools. A tool you don't open daily during the trial won't get better at 50% off. The discount is never the reason to buy; at most it's a reason to act on a decision you'd already made a few weeks earlier or later.

For software I follow a simple order: first the use case (which task gets measurably faster or better?), then a trial with real work, then the price over twelve months. Specialised tools that do one job better than a general chat are the real win, with or without Black Friday. And when a vendor pushes with a countdown, that's pressure, not an argument.

Keep that in mind and Black Friday becomes easy: for the one tool that was on your list anyway, on an annual plan, with a cancellation reminder in your calendar.