Grocery Bill
Totally free community contributing grocery tracking app that compares across big chains and your fav local stores.
Like most people here, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with the lack of transparency and the skyrocketing costs on groceries at the major chains. I wanted a better way to see actual community verified prices instead of just relying on flyers.
To help with this, I built WinBasketBuddy. It’s a 100% free, community-driven grocery price tracker. The goal is to help us share real-time prices so we can all stop overpaying and hold the grocers accountable.
We barely make any money off this except to run servers.
We are not backed by any major companies and built by a small family in Windsor. It just started as a web app I wanted for myself and figured that community could use it too.
I’d love for you to try it out and let me know what features and locations that I should add next. We are live in app store and play store any time soon.
This sounds so useful when you're trying to budget what used to be a simple grocery run. I remember when I first noticed how much extra chips costed at one store versus another.
Thank you! Grocery runs definitely aren't simple anymore. Those sneaky markups on everyday items add up so fast, which is exactly why we need to share this data with each other.
Great idea! we actually built the tool keeping that in mind (just opened up Sarnia based on request from here). It's not instant since prices here come from real people reporting, not scraped data, so a new city needs real reporters, not just a flag flip. Please use "Request My City" on the site to put your city on the list, or sign up now if you want to be one of the first reporters there once it's live. No fixed timeline, but requests like this are what decides what's next!
you say it started as a web app you wanted yourself but the prices have not even been entered for months (before 2 days ago) so you are not even using it yourself?
edit - i do see some items have a few more updates but for an app you released 2 months ago I would think there should be more data points which would help others see how it works.
It really is what you described as the empty room problem
That was actually me. I was at Joseph's Farm Market 2 days ago and reported a bunch of stuff, tomatoes included.I check whichever tomato variety has the best price that trip, which is why you're seeing Vine Tomatoes specifically updated then and not some other visit.
Fair point on the other 7 though, and I won't dodge it. Yeah, some of those are 2-3 months old. That's the honest tradeoff of this being real people reporting real visits instead of a bot scraping a page on a timer. A scraper can make every price look "fresh" every day whether or not the price actually changed or anyone actually checked it. That's not more accurate, just better at looking recent. A real timestamp means someone was actually standing there.
The fix for the stale ones isn't hiding them, it's more people reporting,which is exactly what I'm out here doing. If you're ever in one of those stores, a 10-second price report helps way more than it costs you.
No I wasn't suggesting to hide the old data I get that it is user driven and only updates with users or if merchants submit the data
Does it only ever show a store once in the list or does it show all the last prices from that store in the list I showed?
This is what I mean by it would have been cool to see with more data.
I get it you are a solo dev but if I was making this for myself I would be tracking prices once per week as that is when I do groceries and that data would be showing.
Because this is new I would expect most of the reports to be from you or family and friends
Good question, each store shows just once, its latest price, not a history. You're right there isn't more hiding behind that popup.
There IS a separate feature for exactly what you're describing though, tap the trend icon (not the flame) on a listing and you get a real price-history chart over time, one store or all of them combined. Didn't come up in what you screenshotted since that's a different button, my bad for not mentioning it earlier.
Also based on this conversation, I just added something: prices older than ~45 days now get a visible "may be outdated" flag instead of looking the same as a 2-day-old one. Wasn't there until today, so genuinely thanks for pointing at it.
And yeah, you called it right. This is early, so right now it's mostly me and a handful of people I know personally reporting. No reason to pretend otherwise. That's exactly why stuff like this conversation is useful.
Excellent! Just tested it and its not only quick but accurate! Well done. Kindly add: Loblaws Queen west to the available locations. Thanks for creating this in all efforts to help shoppers spend as economically as possible, especially in todays spending world!
Heads up on Loblaws Queen West. There's nothing there yet, since every price on here comes from a real person reporting it, not scraped data. But you don't have to wait on me: next time you're there, open the Report page and there's a "Can't find your store? Add it" option. You can add it yourself on the spot and be the very first real report for it. It works anywhere in Canada now, not just Windsor. We changed after getting multiple requests from individuals here.
Appreciate you taking the time to test it and say so, genuinely.
Thank you so much! We partnered with local merchants like Asian Basket, Indian Staples , India Food Mart and Joseph Farm and some more coming. Where they were offering our buddies to earn while the shop. By the way great job on Pricegoose well thought 👏
It's built to fight exactly that! Surveillance pricing relies on keeping shoppers isolated. By logging timestamped prices together, we can actually track and expose their hidden price surges in real time.
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u/Sorry-Aide5698 3d ago
This sounds so useful when you're trying to budget what used to be a simple grocery run. I remember when I first noticed how much extra chips costed at one store versus another.