Show HN: Lab Spend – Pricing Search Engine for Research Chemicals and Supplies

Scientists pay radically different prices for the exact chemicals and supplies. We've seen a greater than 10x difference and commonly 3-4x difference in prices for the exact same product.

Complex pricing, rebates, discounting and limited transparency have made it difficult for scientists to determine a fair price. The pricing does not follow a simple trend based on purchasing volume. We've created a community and gathered pricing details from public sources to build a pricing search engine.

The search engine is called Open Pricing and accepts catalog numbers of chemicals and supplies then returns the range, mean, median and histogram of prices.

If you're background is not as scientific researcher, we're solving a similar problem, which exists in other industries such as used cars by Kelley Blue Book, new cars by TrueCar or home values by Zillow.