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preismonitor.at

  • Link: preismonitor.at
  • Collaborators: Lukas Käferle
  • Timeline: May - October 2023
  • Status: paused
  • Stack: Typescript, Next.js, Node, MySQL, Prisma, Kysely, Tailwind, Plausible, Vercel, Planetscale

Preismonitor is a website that shows showed the development of grocery prices in Austria. I developed it in collaboration with Lukas Käferle.

Idea

In 2022 and 2023 inflation was rising in Austria and all over the world. A big driver was the increase in grocery prices.

In May 2023 Martin Kocher, the Austrian Minister for Labour and Economy announced plans for a state grocery price tracker for a few selected products. The plan was quite vague and it wouldn’t launch anytime before fall 2023.

A good friend of mine, Lukas Käferle, suggested that we should just build this ourselves.

We went from idea to launch in 2 weeks. The site is called preismonitor.at and it’s a simple website which shows the price development of ~300 products in 3 supermarkets.

Launch

Analytics for preismonitor.at showing 6.1k unique vistors over 2 months

Even though we launched as fast as possible there were 3 other price trackers that launched before us:

At first we were a bit disappointed that we weren’t the first to launch but then realised that we can gain more from collaborating than competing. I then reached out to all of them and we started a group chat.

Both Lukas and I didn’t have much time to work on the project after launch. Due to the other projects existing we didn’t see a strong need to continue developing it further for the moment.

We still got a few mentions in both national and international media:

Shaping a new law

In July 2023 the Austrian Federal Competition Authority reached out to us and the other grocery price providers to ask us a few questions about our projects. They have been investigating the supermarket industry since fall 2022.

The answers were then used in a final report which was handed over to Martin Kocher, the Minister of Labour and Economy.

The report recommended to create a law which would force supermarkets to report their price data to the ministry which then would make it available via an API.

This would enable developers, researchers and journalists to utilize the data for many different use cases.

In September the Minister for Labour and Economy invited us to consult him on the exact implementation of the law. We were invited together with our friends from heisse-preisse.io, teuerungsportal.at and preisrunter.at.

What’s coming?

In mid October our crawler stopped working and both Lukas and I were too busy to fix it. We decided to pause development until we have more time.

We are planning on dumping our crawler and instead use the data from heisse-preisse.io or the government API (if it actually comes).

A long-term idea is to create a grocery list app which is enhanced by this pricing data. This would allow users to see which supermarket is the cheapest for their current grocery list.