A couple of non-medical options:
A friend of mine swears by consuming locally produced honey - he claims that there are small amounts of local pollens in the honey, and by eating it daily, he builds up an “immunity” to them.
My father-in-law (who suffers worse than anyone I know from allergies) swears by a product calledPrime One which is unfortunately sold by an Amway-style company.
I have tried neither of these approches.
Grim
According to the very first review that’s a Costco housebrand. I’ve never been to a Costco because the nearest one is a couple hours away, but in every other store I’ve been in, the very cheapest you can get cetirizine is $5 for 15, and that is just one store (Marketbasket) everywhere else charges you twice that, making the most common price $0.71 a pill. Thanks for the link, but it’s not common knowledge that anywhere has it as cheap as Costco seems to.
All the big chain drugstores have similarly cheap prices for their house-brand of Zyrtec generic as far as I know. I think I picked up a bottle of 120 for something like $25 from CVS. Not quite as good as the Costco price, granted, but still pretty good. Even then, if you’re just buying the 5-pill box, expect to pay around $5.
I got 120 generic zyrtec for $15 at Target.
I took Allegra for about 4 years and it was great, worked great and had as far as I could see no side effect at all. None. Then, without warning, it just stopped working. Allergist says maybe it will work again some day…for now, zyrtec. Which does make me feel a bit zoned out as someone else said. Not horrible but just a bit. Maybe it will wear off. But I loved Allegra.