Price tracking

Grocery price tracker

Photograph a receipt. Every line on it becomes a record — product, quantity, what you paid, which store, what date. Do that for a few months and you have something no shopping app has: a price history for the things your household actually buys.

Not shelf prices scraped from chains you don’t shop at. Your prices, from your receipts.

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What you get

A price history per product. Every time you’ve bought the same item, in order, with the price per unit. Buying two doesn’t register as a price doubling; anything sold by weight is compared per kilo.
Grocery spending by month, store, and category. The totals a budgeting app gives you, except built from line items rather than a card transaction — so “$412 on groceries” breaks down into what the $412 actually was, and how this differs from a budgeting app is set out in full.
The reference price alongside what you paid. Where a receipt prints a discount, we keep both numbers: the amount that left your account and the amount the store says you’d otherwise have paid. Separate columns, never subtracted from each other.
Search across every receipt you’ve uploaded. When did we last buy coffee, and what did it cost.

How it works

Upload. Photograph the receipt, or drop in a batch you’ve been saving. Old receipts count — history you upload today is history you don’t wait for. You can see what the scan produces before signing up for anything.
We read the lines. Product text, quantity, line total, store, date, straight off the paper.
Lines with the same product text are the same product. Match is on the receipt text, per store. Where there’s a barcode we use it for context — a readable product name instead of the retailer’s abbreviation, and details from public product databases — but the price history is built on the receipt line, because that’s what’s actually there every time.
It accumulates. One receipt gives you an itemized trip. Ten purchases of the same item give you a trend.

What it doesn’t do

Wrong expectations here cost you more than us.

No shelf prices from other stores. We hold nothing you didn’t buy. To find out whether the chain down the road is cheaper this week, use a comparison tool — that’s a real need and they’re good at it. We track your history; they track today. Different questions.
No savings percentage. We won’t claim we’ll cut your bill by some figure. We don’t know that, and nobody who quotes one does either.
No estimated prices. If a number can’t be proven from the arithmetic on the receipt, it shows as missing. A price history with a gap is honest. One with a plausible guess in it is worse than nothing, because you’d trust it. You can also do this by hand with our free template.
No purchase advice. The history is the output. What you do with it is yours. It is also not the only question a record answers — other questions your purchase history answers.

Why a history beats a snapshot

One example, from a real household record.

A 100g bar of dark chocolate, bought 29 times from the same store over 17 months. A discount was printed on the line 24 of those times.

Only 11 of those 29 receipts printed a quantity. The other 18 didn’t, so the price per unit on them can’t be proven, and they’re left out of what follows. That’s the rule this product runs on, applied to our own example: a figure we can’t derive from the receipt is a figure we don’t publish.

Those 11 purchases span nine months. Ten of them carried a discount.

The discounted price went from $3.34 to $4.09. Up 22.5%. The reference price went from $4.49 to $5.49. Up 22.3%.

They moved together. The discount held its proportion the whole way, so every receipt showed a saving of roughly the same size while the amount leaving the account climbed by a fifth.

That’s what a snapshot can’t show you. Any one of those receipts was accurate and told you that you’d saved money. All of them were right. None of them could tell you that the saving was tracking a rising price rather than protecting you from it — because a discount is a comparison against one week’s reference price, and a direction only exists across many purchases of the same item.

That’s what a price history is, and it’s the only place this is visible.

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The receipt reader is not open to the public yet. Leave an address and I will write once, when it is.

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No bank connection, now or ever.

Common questions

Is this a price comparison app?

No. Comparison apps hold current prices across stores. This holds your prices across time.

How many purchases before it’s useful?

Spending totals are useful from the first receipt. Price history needs around ten purchases of the same item before a direction is readable — staples you buy weekly get there in a couple of months.

Does it work for items with no barcode?

Yes. Matching is on the receipt line text, so loose produce and counter items track fine as long as the receipt prints them. The barcode, where there is one, only adds a friendlier product name and details from public product databases.

What if the store changes how it prints a product name?

The history splits — the old name stops appearing and a new one starts. It’s visible rather than silent, which is the tradeoff we chose: matching only on exact receipt text means we never merge two products that aren’t the same.

Can I track spending as well as prices?

Yes. Totals by month, store, and category come from the same line items.

Can I get my data out?

CSV, every line.

Which countries?

Receipt reading is strongest where we have the most receipts, currently Portugal and the US. Elsewhere it works with more corrections from you.

Do you have to be online in the shop?

No. Nothing happens at the till. You photograph the receipt whenever.