Developing a Supermarket Price Awareness Tool
Price Lens is my latest solo endeavour. A tool that helps you see through shelf prices and understand what the real inflation is over time for the products you love and buy most often.
Why this idea?
The idea for this projects came about when I was just casually walking around the supermarket and my solid visual memory noticed an outrageous price for something I absolutely remember the price of 10 years ago. If you visit the supermarket often enough, you'll start to notice these things too. However not everyone will or should be paying attention to these things and we all just get slowly used to new prices and we accept them as normal.
While I'm not saying that it is not normal or expected to see inflation over time on at least some products, I firmly believe most people are unaware of price dynamics, changes and how they are affected by them. I often say that one thing that is immediately changeable to be more transparent and non manipulative with prices is making the price per unit a much more important metric to display.
Price tracking is not a new thing, but I thought I should delve into this anyway. The goal is twofold:
- Make people more aware of price changes, whether it is fluctuations between price points or inflation.
- Provide a clear and simple tool that keeps growing as more data arrives and more features can be added on top of it.
Obivously we can do price alerts, and we will get to that, but the cooler vision for this is to tie in data about consumer price indexes and how much you are saving or losing per product.
Cases immediatly covered by Price Lens' availability:
- Preventing people from buying a product that spends 50% of the time at a much lower price (like 20% less). Price patterns are a thing and the chains use that to their advantage.
- Realizing what actually is a discount and what is just a permanent price write-off. I mean it's only a discount if it's temporary, right? Pretty much but that's not what the labels say.
- Collecting data over the years to actually measure direct inflation on intemporal products like bread, milk, eggs, chicken etc.
As of today, 18/Mar/2025, Price Lens is still in Early Access but stay tuned, because as a true indie developer we want to discover the way as we go.