The law has the concept of consideration and there is a level of judgment used on these kinds of things. Intent is part of the law too. Which means if someone falsely puts a cheap price for a product to get you into a store (or something like that) they’ll likely be on the hook for that, it’s false advertising. But if someone simply made a typo and the price on offer doesn’t line up to reasonable consideration, then it’s not binding. There was no intent to deceive, and the price isn’t reasonable consideration for the product.

So while there may be times you may be able to benefit from someone making a mistake, there will be many times you won’t. That’s not a bad thing since the same law protects you if you make a mistake. If someone puts into the fine print of a contact that you should give them all of your possessions, and you didn’t notice it, the law would also throw that out because they didn’t offer reasonable consideration for your possessions.

So you don’t have recourse (nor should you) in the scenario where someone made an honest mistake like with a typo. Sucks that for a moment you thought you were getting a laptop for a ridiculously cheap price, but think about what it would mean on the other end. You’d be getting a laptop without paying a reasonable price for it, the company would have to eat the cost, and some poor bastard would probably be fired for making a typo. Is a cheap laptop really worth someone else losing their job?