← All Automations LIVE PRICE-TRACKING DASHBOARD

PriceSniff

Grocery prices creep up quietly and nobody has time to track them by hand. PriceSniff is a one-time-setup, then fully passive watcher — pick a zip code and a short staple list once, and a daily job checks real Kroger prices so you always know if something's spiking or a cheaper swap just showed up.

WHAT IT DOES

Zero upkeep, real prices.

• Every tracked item is locked to a specific Kroger product ID via live search — not a search term that can silently drift to a different product day to day
• Single-screen dashboard: today's price, deltas vs yesterday and vs last week, and a 14-day sparkline for every staple, no navigation required
• Click a card to expand it in place — a hoverable price-history chart plus up to 3 genuinely cheaper alternatives, each linking straight to that product's real Kroger page
• No receipt photos, no bank or card connection — the only manual step is picking your items once

HOW IT WORKS

Built, broken, and fixed — in public.

1. Daily cron against the real Kroger API

   A Vercel Cron job hits a protected route once a day, calls Kroger's Products API for each locked item, and stores a fresh price snapshot in Supabase Postgres — including brand, size, category, and the current cheapest alternatives.

2. Product locking, not term re-search

   Early versions re-searched a term like "milk" every day and could silently drift onto a different product. Staples now lock to one exact Kroger productId chosen at setup, so the price history is always for the same real item.

3. A dashboard you actually open, not a silent push

   PriceSniff started as a push-notification-only tracker. When push delivery turned out to be broken (and stayed deprioritized), the dashboard itself became the whole interface — today's price, comparisons, and alternatives, all visible on load.

4. Visual restyle handed off to Lovable, ported back by hand

   The dashboard's cartoon sniffing-nose brand and mint/cream palette were designed in Lovable, then ported into the real Next.js codebase — logic files like the comparison math and cron routes were never touched by the restyle, only the UI layer around them.

WATCH IT RUN

See it in action.

TRY IT

Live, open source, ready to run.

Pick a zip code, add a few Kroger staples, and watch the dashboard fill in as the daily price checks land.