Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by juxtaposicion on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:01PM
(#43827723)
Yeah, I agree. It is a pain to search product by product instead of sticking to one store. Also popgot.com can only do what's online & shipped to you -- so really just the non-perishables / daily essentials that are not fresh groceries. But even when limited to consumables I save ~$100/mo by basically buying by unit price.
Uploading a receipt to see how much you can save... that's a good idea. I think I can find your email via your personal site. Can I email you when we have a prototype ready?
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by abdullahkhalids on Monday April 28, 2025 @09:11PM
(#43827794)
A one time email is fine.
However, I am in Canada. So can only test it once you expand there. Thanks.
I don't know how things are in the US, but it does seem like the grocery store oligopoly is squeezing consumers a lot, so tools like this are valuable for injecting competition into the system.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by nosecreek on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @01:29PM
(#43835549)
Shameless plug for my own project (https://grocerytracker.ca/) since you're in Canada. Eventually I'd love for it to do what you're suggesting, but for now the closest thing you can do is create a basket for each store with the same items and then check each week to see which is the cheapest.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by amelius on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @05:30AM
(#43830367)
This is a great idea. And OCR should be good enough nowadays to parse the receipts. Probably would work best as a mobile app, though.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
by what on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @01:15AM
(#43841509)
Have you looked at receipts? They’re narrow, only do one line per item, and every store prints something different for the same product. It usually includes a store specific sku, the price and some truncated text on that single line. Good luck figuring out exactly what someone purchased from a random receipt.
However, what I would like is a product where I upload my shopping receipt for a few weeks/months from the one store I go to. The application figures out what I typically buy and then compares the 4-5 big stores and tells me which one I should go to for least price.