Every one of these comes up in a normal shop. None is answerable from where you’re standing, and most aren’t answerable by any app either — including ours.
What follows is clear about which is which.
Coming, not built
You’re looking for tahini in a store you’ve been to fifty times. Not with the peanut butter. Not in the international aisle. Someone moved it, or it was never there, and you’re on your third lap.
Search “what aisle is tahini in” and you get an answer for a generic supermarket, which is not the store you’re standing in. Aisle layouts differ by chain, by location, and by whatever the manager rearranged last month. The same is true of every awkward item — cornstarch, water chestnuts, active dry yeast, evaporated milk, food coloring. They’re all somewhere sensible in someone’s store and somewhere baffling in yours.
What a purchase record can do: nothing on its own. A receipt records what you bought, not where you found it. But you knew where it was the moment you found it — and that’s a four-second note worth a lot on the next trip.
Product notes are coming, not built. Tied to the product and the store, so “aisle 7, bottom shelf, near the pickles” is there when you’re back in that store looking for that thing.
What it can’t do: tell you where something is in a store you’ve never been to, or notice when they move it. Nothing can.
Works today
You’re holding a bottle of olive oil — the one you always buy. There’s a price on the shelf and a sale tag next to it.
Is it good? No idea. You’ve bought that bottle thirty times and couldn’t tell anyone what you paid on a single one of them.
Look it up and you’ll find national averages — the average price of ground beef per pound, what a dozen eggs costs this year. Useful for reading the news, useless in the aisle. Your store isn’t the national average, and neither is the size or brand you actually buy.
What a purchase record can do: all of it, today. The answer was always in your kitchen drawer, in a stack of paper nobody can read. Your last thirty prices for that exact bottle, in order, with dates. Now the shelf price means something: it’s the most you’ve ever paid, or it’s typical, or it’s the lowest in a year. Price history per product.
What it can’t do: tell you whether the store across town is cheaper right now. Different tool, and we don’t pretend to be one.
Coming, not built
You’re standing in front of the coffee. Do you need it? You bought a bag recently — or was that last month?
Guess wrong one way and there are three bags in the cupboard. Guess wrong the other and you’re out Wednesday morning. Same problem with paper towels, dish soap, dog food, anything you buy on a rhythm rather than a plan. Writing a shopping list doesn’t fix it, because the list comes from the same faulty memory that got you here.
What a purchase record can do: the dates are already in it. Every purchase of that coffee and how long the gaps ran. If it’s usually about five weeks and the last one was seven weeks ago, that isn’t a guess — it’s a pattern, sitting in receipts you already scanned.
We haven’t turned this into reminders or a predicted shopping list yet. The data is there. It’s one of the more obvious next things.
What it can’t do: know you had houseguests, or that your kid stopped drinking it. It sees purchases, not consumption. A good hint, not an oracle.
Partly here, the rest coming
There was a pasta sauce. It was good. It was maybe four months ago and you cannot remember the brand. You’re now looking at eleven jars, one of which is it.
Or the reverse: there was one nobody finished, and you’re about to buy it again.
Or the version that catches everyone eventually: the butter you always buy isn’t on the shelf. You’re not asking which butter is good — you’re asking which other one you’ve bought before, and what it cost. Two things only your own record knows.
No calculation solves any of this. You either have the record or you don’t. And “check my purchase history” is only a real option if the history is itemized — a bank statement saying $86.40 at a supermarket tells you nothing about which sauce.
What a purchase record can do: it’s there with the description the store printed, the date, the price, the store. Searchable. “What did we buy in October” becomes a question with an answer.
Ratings and notes per product — the part where you record the good one, not the other one — are coming. Smallest feature on this page and possibly the most useful.
What it can’t do: remember something you never bought. The thing you tried at a friend’s house isn’t in your receipts, and neither is the alternative you’ve never picked up. This isn’t a recommender — it’s your own history, which means it’s only as useful as it is long.
No receipts kept yet, and no hurry to scan them — start by hand with a template →
Works today
There’s a sale tag on the shelf. There’ll be a saving printed under the line on your receipt. Both are accurate.
Neither tells you whether the price you pay has been climbing.
A discount is measured against a reference price the store sets. If that reference moves, the discount stays real and honest while the amount leaving your account goes up. You can’t see it from one receipt, because one receipt is one week.
We have a chocolate bar in our own record where the discounted price went from $3.34 to $4.09 and the reference price went from $4.49 to $5.49 — up 22.5% and 22.3%, in parallel, over nine months. Every purchase carried a discount. Every discount was real. Not one told us which direction anything was moving.
What a purchase record can do: show both lines over time, so the pattern is a shape you read in four seconds instead of something invisible. Works today.
What it can’t do: tell you the store did anything wrong. It usually didn’t. The point isn’t accusation — it’s that a shopper had no way to see this, and now can.
Needs history first
You’re halfway round and you’ve lost count. You find out at the checkout, which is the worst possible moment to find out.
Grocery cost calculators exist and they work off national averages — a generic price for chicken breast, a generic price for a box of cereal. That produces a number, but it’s somebody else’s number, for products you might not buy at a store you don’t shop at. If you buy store-brand pasta at $1.29 and the calculator assumes $2.49, the estimate is wrong before you start.
What a purchase record could do: estimate from what you actually pay. A list of twelve items you buy regularly, priced at your prices, at your store, in your usual sizes. Same question, materially better answer — and the gap between the two is the whole argument for keeping a record at all.
It’s the one we most want to build and haven’t. It needs enough history to be worth anything.
What it can’t do: be accurate early. A cart estimate built on three receipts is a guess wearing a number. We’d rather say that than show you a figure that looks precise and isn’t.
Being straight about the limits, because a page claiming to fix everything is a page to distrust.
Anything about right now. Live shelf prices, current stock, whether another store has it cheaper today. A record is made of the past. It’s good at the past and has nothing to say about this afternoon.
Anything with no receipt. Cash at a farmers market, eggs from a neighbor, a produce box with no itemization. No paper, nothing to read.
Whether you should buy something. No rankings, no recommendations, no nudges. The record is the output. What you do with it is yours.
Making you spend less. We won’t put a percentage on that and nobody honest would. Knowing what you pay isn’t the same as paying less. It’s the part that was missing.
Two of the six work today. Three are what we’d build next. One needs history before it’s worth anything.
The store has kept a record of every one of these purchases for years. This is you keeping it too.
We’ll say when the ones marked coming arrive.
Or see what one receipt turns into first — try it on one receipt →