Sacramento Groceries | Price Comparison App

The problem

Grocery prices in Sacramento vary dramatically between stores, but there is no good way to compare them. National deal apps like Flipp focus on chain circulars and miss the international markets, discount chains, and specialty shops that Sacramento shoppers actually use. So you either drive to three stores hoping to save money or just pay whatever your nearest one charges.

What I built

SacGroceries is a free price comparison platform that tracks 173,000+ products across 39 Sacramento-area stores. Search for any product, see prices from every store sorted by cost, and build shopping lists optimized by store and driving route. The platform covers 16 international markets, 5 discount chains, premium markets, warehouse clubs, traditional supermarkets, and specialty shops, from WinCo and Costco to Nugget Markets and Grocery Outlet.

Everything on the site is free. There is no subscription, no paid tier, and no feature gate. The premium plan that existed early on was removed, and every feature it covered, including price history and route optimization, is now available to anyone with a free account.

Architecture

Edge computing: The entire backend runs on Cloudflare Workers with a D1 (SQLite) database. No servers to manage, no cold start delays, and API responses under 50ms because everything runs at the edge. The Hono framework handles routing, and TypeScript covers the full stack.

Data pipeline: Scheduled Workers running on cron triggers collect and normalize price data from store sources. An automated email pipeline processes 10+ weekly store circulars without manual intervention. Price data includes freshness metadata with color-coded indicators (fresh under 30 days, aging, stale, outdated past 90) so shoppers know exactly how current each price is.

Retention: Prices are never deleted. A stale price is still a useful data point, so old records stay in the database and stay visible on the site, labeled by freshness tier rather than hidden. Price history is kept for the lifetime of the product, which is what makes the 2.1 million all-time price records worth something.

Client-side storage: Shopping lists persist in localStorage with IndexedDB for offline caching. The app works without installation, fully browser-based, with offline detection so saved lists are always accessible.

Key features

• Side-by-side price comparison across 39 stores with real-time search
• Shopping list builder with sequential product matching and unified multi-store view
• Weekly sale tracking from 10+ automated store circulars
• Recipe parsing that extracts ingredients from any recipe and matches them to store prices, with duplicate ingredient merging
• Price freshness indicators showing exactly how current each data point is
• Package size data for 48,000+ products enabling true unit-price comparison
• Community price submissions via web form and email, a “neighbors helping neighbors” model

Trip optimization

The most technically interesting part of the app is the piece that answers the question shoppers actually have, which is not “who has eggs for $2.99” but “what does this whole trip cost me.”

• Smart list optimizer that factors in driving distances and current gas prices to find the lowest total trip cost, not just the lowest price per item
• Real driving distance calculations powered by OSRM routing rather than straight-line estimates
• Live gas prices scraped weekly from AAA for the Sacramento metro, combined with the shopper’s own fuel type and vehicle MPG to compute actual cost per mile
• Price history charts showing trends over time so shoppers can time purchases
• Price drop alerts with configurable thresholds and weekly email digests
• Preferred store locations for personalized route optimization

All of it is free. This started as the paid tier, and gating it turned out to be the wrong call for a tool whose whole point is helping people spend less money.

Content and community

The platform publishes weekly recaps analyzing price movements across Sacramento’s grocery market, plus monthly trend reports tracking category shifts across all 39 stores. The changelog documents the full development history from launch to current state.

The Sacramento angle

This project exists because I live in Sacramento and I got tired of overpaying for groceries. The store coverage reflects where Sacramento people actually shop, including the international markets on Stockton Boulevard, the discount chains in South Sacramento, and the premium markets in East Sac. National apps do not cover these stores. A local tool built by a local developer does.