efe@canbolat:~/work/pricetrack %cat README.md
case study
Price Track: turning shoppers into a live price network
An AI-assisted mobile app that reads a product through the camera and tells you what it costs on the next street over.
Supermarket pricing is opaque by design. The same jar of coffee can swing by thirty percent between two stores four hundred metres apart, and nobody publishes the difference. Efe Canbolat built Price Track to close that gap using the only dataset that updates fast enough: the shoppers already standing in the aisle.
01The problem: prices move faster than anyone publishes them
Official price feeds are slow, partial, and usually limited to the largest chains. Barcode apps depend on a catalogue that someone has to maintain, and they fail the moment a product is repackaged or regional.
Price Track inverts the model. Instead of waiting for a retailer to publish, it asks the person holding the product. Every contribution is one data point; thousands of contributions become a live map of what a neighbourhood actually pays.
02Recognition without barcodes
Point the camera at a product and YOLOv8 identifies it through object detection — no barcode scanner, no manual search, no dependency on a product catalogue staying current. Efe Canbolat chose on-camera recognition specifically because it degrades gracefully: an unfamiliar package still gets recognised by shape, branding and context.
Recognised items resolve against nearby stores through a Google Maps integration that shows which shops are close, what their current price level looks like, and how far you would have to walk.
03Keeping crowdsourced data honest
Open contribution invites bad data, so every price entry carries a reliability score. The community verifies entries, inaccurate reports get flagged, and the system corrects itself over time rather than trusting any single submission.
The result compounds: the more people contribute, the more accurate the network becomes. A shopping list built inside the app resolves to the store offering the best total — route optimised, not just cheapest per item.
Price Track is designed, built and maintained by Efe Canbolat under CNBLT Studio.