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439 points david927 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.688s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
1. cbolanos79 ◴[] No.44443757[source]
Currently, in a side project to keep track of pricing in the supermarkets, as since the start of the war of Ukraine, the prices have raised, event skyrocketed in some cases, without any real explanation. In some cases, I've seen how a product has raised up to 1€ in some months. The way to keep the pricing changes is to take a picture of a supermarket receipt, store the information, and calculate the pricing diff for each article. For extracting the information, I use Textract from AWS, as it fits my needs, however, it could be possible to replace it with any other OCR which can extract structured information. My purpose is to improve the project gradually and add statistical information, like charts showing the pricing changes along the time, show the most bought products in a period of time, etc

As the project relies on AWS service, I have decided to not publish a free demo, as it would be exposed to abuse by sending all kind of images, not to talk about crazy billing. However, here is a screenshot on how does it display the receipt details:

https://ibb.co/pv2ksRhH

There is a raise on one article, and a down on some others

The project is built using Ruby on Rails and runs on docker. It is light enough to run on a cheap VPS.

Feel free to take a look on it: https://gitlab.com/cbolanos79/sbt_rails

Any constructive opinion/collaboration is welcome :)

replies(1): >>44444031 #
2. lappet ◴[] No.44444031[source]
hey there, I spent some time working on something very similar, but I am based in the US! I was able to import receipts from Safeway & Costco here, using private APIs. But since stores here don't really support OAuth, and using a private API may not be the best long term approach, I paused my effort. I would love to chat if you are interested. I used react to build a prototype.