A2Tracked three actual checkouts this month to see if coupert is legit, mixed bag

A friend keeps telling me these coupon extensions are basically data harvesting with a discount on top. I had no idea if he was right. I've had one installed for probably a year and never once paid attention to what it did at checkout, just clicked through.
So I wrote down what happened on my next three orders.
First one, $68 of basics from a mid-size menswear site before a work trip. Nothing. The extension just sat there. Paid full price. Might as well not have been installed.
Second, a jacket from an outlet site, somewhere in the fifties. It found something and applied it before I got to the payment screen. Four bucks off, maybe a bit more. I didn't do anything.
Third was bigger, shoes plus a couple of accessories, around $110. Knocked off something like nine dollars. There was supposed to be cashback on top of that and it's still sitting in pending. Day 9. No idea if that's normal or if it just quietly dies.
So: one nothing, one small win, one win with an asterisk. Three orders is not data, I know that. But it's three more than I had before.
For what it's worth I ran honey for years before the whole affiliate thing came out. Tried capital one shopping for a while too, that one found stuff on maybe half the sites I actually shop at.
Where I landed: if legit means it works every time, no, obviously not. One in three did nothing here. If it means it occasionally saves you real money and costs nothing to leave running, that's closer to what I actually saw.
Still waiting on that pending balance though. Ask me in a month.