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I built an app for comparing grocery prices across UK supermarkets

I built an app for comparing grocery prices across UK supermarkets

by poppet1208·Apr 6, 2026·2 points·0 comments

AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemSolve My Problem

Beats Trolley on unit price sorting with vector-search categorization.

Strengths
  • Embeddings-based ETL pipeline normalizes messy product data across nine supermarkets automatically.
  • Includes loyalty card prices like Clubcard and Nectar for accurate cost comparison.
  • React Native app with 1k+ downloads proves real-world traction beyond a hobby.
Weaknesses
  • Ad-supported model might annoy users compared to ad-free competitors or open-source tools.
  • Limited to UK stores, making the codebase less reusable for international developers.
Category
Target Audience

UK shoppers looking to reduce weekly grocery bills

Similar To

Trolley · MySupermarket · Google Shopping

Post Description

I'm a first year CS student at Sheffield and built this over the past year because I thought I could do better than Trolley.

Stack: React Native & Typesense for vector search and filtering. An ETL pipeline runs in the background handling scraping and automatic product categorisation using embeddings.

Covers Aldi, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose, Iceland, Ocado / M&S and Co-op. Clubcard and Nectar prices included. Sort by price per unit, filter by category and stores near you.

This was fun to make, and I have a lot planned, with some WIP:

- Basket Generation based on entering a shopping list and getting cheapest products for each store, and cheapest collection of stores for the cheapest total shop. Feels quite magical even in dev mode right now

- Local price estimates. Local stores differ from online prices by up to 20% depending on store fascia. I'm thinking to record a basket of goods for each local store and use it to estimate local prices

- Crowdsourced prices. Tricky one, due to running from a cold start. Would be very useful for certain stores without online prices, eg. Lidl.

That's all for now! Hopefully it'll help me get an internship even without traction ^_^

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Compare Prices with SupplyFLare AI

Nice, search-focused UI with CSV upload and an explicit LTR angle — that specificity is promising for people who care about ranked pricing signals rather than raw scrape dumps. The site feels early (empty results, minimal onboarding and coverage notes), so the real question is whether their non-stationary-data approach to ranking actually beats simple heuristics at scale. If the ML pipeline and freshness guarantees are solid, this is useful to its niche; right now it's a tidy MVP.

Ship ItSlick
invar1ant
103mo ago