The holiday season is right around the corner and there’s no reason why you can’t get some holiday shopping done early. Stocking stuffers in particular are pretty tough gifts to find. You don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on something super expensive, but you also don’t want to gift something that’ll break in two months or that the other person won’t like.

Well, we’re here to help. Here are a collection of stocking stuffers that cost $30 or less.

Read more: Best budget fitness trackers

These also make great gifts for secret Santa or less expensive gifts for acquaintances or extended family members. We’ve even included a fun gag gift that’s sure to make the party laugh.

Best tech gifts under $30

The Tile Mate is an excellent gift for under $30. They run for $24.99 even when they’re not on sale and are some of the most universally useful pieces of tech you can buy. You attach it to essentially anything, including a luggage bag, keychain, or you can even stuff it in a purse. From there, you can use your phone to find the item if you lose it. It also works in reverse, and you can use a Tile Mate to find your smartphone if you lose it too.

It works with both Android and iOS devices as well. In addition, it has smart home support for Google, Apple, and Amazon. That means you can get one of these for basically anyone, and they can make use of it. There is also a network for Tile users where your item can be found by a nearby Tile user, even if it’s outside its 250-foot range from your smartphone. Some folks think this is a terrible gift idea because your phone’s Bluetooth has to be on all the time, but those people probably wear smartwatches or fitness bands anyway.

Anker’s 10K Portable Charger is another low cost gift that is useful for just about anyone. Portable batteries are excellent for when you need power in a pinch and don’t have a nearby outlet. This one from Anker includes both USB-C and USB-A ports, so it’s compatible with most charging cables out of the box. It comes with a 10,000mAh cell, which is capable of charging an iPhone 15 Pro Max from 0 to 100 per cent twice on a full charge.

It’s not the most incredible charger in the world. If you spend over the $30 allotment, you can find stuff like MagSafe chargers for iOS devices and chargers with much larger cells. However, we’re not shopping for super expensive stuff. This battery pack is from a good brand and is good enough to carry in a backpack or purse for those emergency top-offs.

The iFixit Moray Driver Kit is a great gift for DIYers. It comes with 32-bits, including almost all the ones you need to fix electronics and build a PC. You get the typical stuff like Phillips and flathead screwdriver bits, which is expected. However, we appreciate the inclusion of many specialized bits, like a Torx Security bit, which is needed for disassembling console controllers. In essence, you have what you need to fix most things.

The difficult part with this as a gift is that there are plenty of options. The slightly larger Mahi Driver Kit is $40 while the Mako Driver Kit is $50. The step-up is almost always worth it. In terms of overall quality, these are pretty good. I own the Mako kit personally that I used to build my PC just a few months ago. The only real gripe I had is that I wish the bits were also magnetic. However, they do grip rather well, so it’s not the worst thing. Every iFixit kit comes with a limited lifetime warranty as well.

Gift cards are indeed rather impersonal. However, they’re universally useful, and you can find a gift card for anything. If you give someone a $20 gift card for Xbox, they can spend it on games, in-game purchases, DLC, media, or even purchase Xbox Gold or Xbox GamePass. You can find gift cards for any gaming platform fairly easily on sites like Amazon. Additionally, there are game-specific gift cards, like V-Bucks gift cards for Fortnite. A game-specific gift card may be a tad more personal.

The only real downside to a gift card is that, for this budget, it’s almost impossible to get one that’ll buy a recently released AAA game. Fortunately, a lot of gamers are into indie stuff which goes for far less. Last Christmas, my brother gave me a $20 gift card to Steam and I used it to buy Phasmophobia, a horror game that I’ve since dumped a couple of hundred hours into with my wife. Not a bad end experience for a gift card.

This is another nice gift idea, especially for the gamers or work from home people in your life. The Kafri RGB headphone stand indeed holds headphones as its name suggests. However, it also includes two electrical outlets, two USB-A ports, and a USB-C port that you can use to charge devices. This alleviates your power strip, PC, or other power management from having to do it. We also like that the RGB strip adds some ambiance without being too loud.

The only real downside to these is that you can’t control the RGB that much. There is a button on the front that cycles through colors and a generic RGB rainbow option. However, that also works in its favor since it’s there to add a bit of decoration and not there to be a focal point of a desk setup. This thing is a steal for under $30.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite is just what the doctor ordered for inexpensive streaming sticks. It comes with the basics of any Amazon Fire TV Stick, including access to free, ad-supported TV streaming like Tubi, Freevee, Pluto TV, and others. Of course, you can get the big names like Netflix, Hulu, and others here as well. It works great as an introduction to streaming sticks, especially for gift recipients who don’t want to make the leap without a little nudge.

This is Amazon’s least expensive option, which means there are some things you won’t get. That includes Amazon’s picture-in-picture mode, Fire TV Ambient Experience, and the option to connect and control your other HDMI devices like game consoles. That’s okay, though, because this is designed for folks who would want to keep it simple anyway.

Hand warmers have grown up a lot in the last decade or so. The Ocoopa Magnetic Hand Warmers is a good example. It’s a fairly simple rechargeable hand warmer that should last several hours between charges. The warmers come with three heat settings, and the highest setting does get quite warm. There are also magnets to affix these to each other for each storage and transport, or if you just want a larger hand warmer. They also come in five colors, so you can match your gift recipient with a color they like.

There aren’t a lot of downsides for a product like this. The magnetic side doesn’t get hot at all, which is by design. That means if you want something to grip with your whole hand, this won’t necessarily do the trick. Also, it’s yet another thing to plug into the wall socket and some folks may not like that. Otherwise, it’s a good budget gift idea.

Long gone are the days when we would slam phones down to hang up on people. However, screaming angrily into a pillow is still totally en vogue, so here’s a tech pillow for your next caterwaul. That’s where a gift like this one comes in. It’s essentially a pillow that sits on your desktop that you can punch at your leisure. Doing so while it’s connected to your PC is the same as pressing the Enter key, so it’s a stress relieving way to end a very angry message. It’s also soft enough to be a pillow, although only just so, so it’s useful for short naps.

Perhaps the best part of this product comes from the Amazon description. The company actually made a prior version of this where the chip inside that registered button presses was too thin and would break when punched. This newer version comes with a thicker chip that is more impact-resistant. That’s some good customer service, right there. It’s not indestructible, though, so take that into consideration.

The best stocking stuffers for under $30: The bottom line

There are so many gift ideas for under $30 that it boggles the mind. That said, a lot of them are not quality items that you can use every day or even once in a while. Thus, we wanted to populate this list with tech that someone might actually want and use. A Tile tracker finds your keys when you lose them, which is universally helpful.

How many people put their wireless headsets on their desk when they’re done gaming? Boom, headphone stand. Even the hand warmers are rechargeable and easy to store, so they can be pulled out next winter. The big USB enter key that you punch could be fun for the right person. These ideas are, we feel, a step above the usual stuff budget-oriented stuff that doesn’t show much imagination and should have your friends and family grinning come unwrapping season – no matter the holiday you celebrate.

How did we choose the best tech gifts under $30?

By browsing similar lists, Amazon, and other websites for hours and hours until we came up with a list of gifts that might actually get used by their recipient. It’s not always a great choice to brute force something like this, but in this case, it was kind of warranted. There are simply too many products out there in this price range, and we wanted to find the best ones.

Once a list had been established, it’s mostly a matter of picking the ones that we’ve either used or had solid reviews all around. For example, I’ve personally used the headphone stand and the larger version of the iFixit kit, so I can vouch for their quality. There are tons of even less expensive gifts, like a good braided USB cable isn’t a bad stocking stuffer by any stretch, but you can find those for under $10, and we wanted to explore the stuff closer to $30.

What tech gifts under $30 should you avoid getting?

This varies from person to person as we all have different tastes. For example, my wife has a friend who absolutely loves thick, itchy, hideous Christmas sweaters. I, on the other hand, have a very short list of things I truly despise and thick, itchy, hideous Christmas sweaters is on it. That said, there are some things that you can probably avoid for the sake of any gift recipient.

For starters, avoid very inexpensive products that do like five different things. If you’re looking at a Bluetooth alarm clock phone stand with integrated night light and wireless charger for $15, there’s a very high chance that some or all of those functions aren’t that great. We would also recommend against things like that $9 USB desktop vacuum that probably has less suction than a human inhale.

Most tech products have a price tag where going higher doesn’t net you much noticeable improvement in quality. The inverse is also true. There is a price floor where, once you hit it, the product is almost guaranteed to be subpar. A good example of this is Bluetooth speakers. The $40 Anker Soundcore 2 is going to sound vastly better than any $10 Bluetooth speaker unless it’s a $40 speaker on sale for $10. Sometimes it’s worth it to spend the extra few bucks.

• These 8 gadgets make excellent stocking stuffers, and they’re all currently on sale
• Best gifts under $75: Quality Tech on a budget
• Best gifts for $100 or less: Perfect presents without premium pricing
• Best portable chargers for USB-C phones: Universal charging on the go