Think Gasbuddy for Everything. OpenPriceMap is a community-driven price map that helps you find the cheapest groceries near you — and every price you report makes the map better for everyone.

The Origin Story

I originally built OpenPriceMap back in 2012. At the time I was dieting pretty hard and needed to find specific foods to hit my macros. The thing was, New York City posed a unique challenge. Not only was everything more expensive than where I had moved from, but stores across the street from one another sold the exact same item — say Chobani Yogurt — at wildly different prices. You could literally cross the street and save 30%. One store charged $1.99, the next one $2.99. For the same yogurt.

So I built OpenPriceMap to start capturing these prices rather than trying to remember them all myself. The idea was simple: if I logged prices, and others did too, we could build a map of all the local prices in a city. Then you could build a shopping cart, and the app would tell you the optimal route — which stores to visit, what to buy at each one — to minimize your total spend while balancing travel distance. (The computer scientists among you might recognize this as the traveling salesman problem.)

Why It Was Hard

There were a lot of problems back then. The biggest one was that we were asking busy people to do a lot of data entry on their phones. We needed to know not only what item you were buying, but where. If the store or product didn’t already exist in the database, you had to enter the store name, address, item name, brand, size, UPC — the works. That’s a lot of friction.

UPC scanners and GPS coordinates helped, but data quality was still a nightmare. Someone would report a Coke at $1.99 but forget to mention it was the 12oz, not the 20oz. Misspellings created duplicate items that should have been combined. As far as I know, Jet.com was the only company that even partially succeeded at building a unified product catalog across vendors who all encoded their inventory differently — and that took an entire team and some serious technology. I don’t think even they fully “solved it.”

Why Now?

I’m not sure I can solve all of those problems on my own, but I think the world has changed a lot since 2012. AI can now help with things that used to require machine learning specialists and data scientists — normalizing product names, merging duplicates, extracting structured data from messy input. The hard parts are becoming tractable. The grocery price problem hasn’t gone away. If anything, inflation has made it worse. So I’m relaunching OpenPriceMap.

What’s In It For You?

This is the part I’m most excited about. The core idea is that helping yourself helps everyone. When you report a price, you’re not doing volunteer work for some faceless community — you’re building your own shopping cart. The community benefit is a side effect of you saving money.

Here’s how it works: you log prices as you shop, and the shopping cart feature uses that data (yours and everyone else’s) to help you plan the cheapest route for your grocery list. Every price you contribute makes the map smarter for you and for your neighbors. No extra effort. You’re multiplying your impact just by shopping.

And there’s more coming. I’m building gamification into the platform — leaderboards for top price reporters in your area, badges for achievements like confirming prices or discovering new stores. Think becoming the “mayor” of your local grocery scene, like the old Foursquare days. If you’re going to save money anyway, you might as well get some bragging rights.

Let’s Build This Together

I’ll be honest: the data isn’t perfect right now. It’s a relaunch, and I’m working to clean things up on the backend. But the app is live, the vision is the same as it was in 2012, and the technology to actually pull it off finally exists. I’m building this in public and I’d love for you to be part of it.

Sign up at openpricemap.com, start reporting prices at your local stores, and let’s build the price map your neighborhood deserves. Every price you log helps — yourself first, and everyone else for free.