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Price Scout

A cost-of-living dashboard that tracks grocery, fuel, and energy prices across Australia and the UK. Households see how their spending compares week to week — without manually checking five supermarket apps.

Category  AI · Cost-of-living Stack  Next.js 14 · Postgres · Prisma · BullMQ LLM  — Status  In final testing

The problem

Cost-of-living conversations are mostly anecdote. The data exists — supermarkets, fuel stations, and energy providers all publish prices — but it’s scattered, formatted differently, and goes stale by the time anyone aggregates it. Households can’t tell if their grocery bill is rising because of inflation or because their habits changed.

What we’re building

Price Scout scrapes weekly price snapshots across major Australian and UK retailers via SerpAPI, normalises them into a per-item-per-region database, and surfaces trends week-over-week. Households connect their preferred basket — what they actually buy — and see whether their spend is tracking with the broader market or drifting.

The data angle

The interesting work isn’t the scraping — it’s the normalisation. “500g pasta” means six different SKUs across six retailers; matching them takes a structured product taxonomy that’s curated, not learned. We treat the taxonomy as the asset.

How it’ll be used

  • Households doing a budget reset who want a baseline.
  • Journalists and policy researchers who need cost-of-living data without paying for ABS or ONS API access.
  • Comparison sites who want a clean per-item history feed.

Where we are

Scrapers and the taxonomy are working. The household dashboard is in private testing with a small group of users in both regions. Next milestone is the alerts layer — tell users when an item in their basket spikes or drops more than a threshold.