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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I have the time to go to different stores to buy different things based on what is cheap. I have one fixed one.

However, what I would like is a product where I upload my shopping receipt for a few weeks/months from the one store I go to. The application figures out what I typically buy and then compares the 4-5 big stores and tells me which one I should go to for least price.

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Yeah, I agree. It is a pain to search product by product instead of sticking to one store. Also popgot.com can only do what's online & shipped to you -- so really just the non-perishables / daily essentials that are not fresh groceries. But even when limited to consumables I save ~$100/mo by basically buying by unit price.

Uploading a receipt to see how much you can save... that's a good idea. I think I can find your email via your personal site. Can I email you when we have a prototype ready?

A one time email is fine.

However, I am in Canada. So can only test it once you expand there. Thanks.

I don't know how things are in the US, but it does seem like the grocery store oligopoly is squeezing consumers a lot, so tools like this are valuable for injecting competition into the system.

Shameless plug for my own project (https://grocerytracker.ca/) since you're in Canada. Eventually I'd love for it to do what you're suggesting, but for now the closest thing you can do is create a basket for each store with the same items and then check each week to see which is the cheapest.

This is a great idea. And OCR should be good enough nowadays to parse the receipts. Probably would work best as a mobile app, though.

Have you looked at receipts? They’re narrow, only do one line per item, and every store prints something different for the same product. It usually includes a store specific sku, the price and some truncated text on that single line. Good luck figuring out exactly what someone purchased from a random receipt.

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