Where it all began

Welcome! And let's get started.

To be candid, this project might not have come to life if it weren't for the rising food prices in Ontario. However, in 2023, I began to notice a gradual increase in my family's grocery expenses. Our diet is fairly balanced, with a mix of dairy, meat, fish, vegetables, and fruit, and we generally feel satisfied with our nutrition. Nevertheless, with prices on the rise, I wanted to find a way to reduce our costs in the long term. This prompted me to start tracking our spending on individual products.

I explored several existing apps but found none that met my needs. For a long time, I used Mint to monitor my personal expenses, but they discontinued their service in Canada. YNAB seemed promising, but the subscription cost was too high for my purposes. Moreover, these services tracked expenses at the transaction level, while I needed a more detailed breakdown of costs for individual products.

After looking into receipt scanners, I tried SimplyWise for a while. However, after the user-friendly experience of Mint, I found SimplyWise challenging to use. Spending 5-10 minutes to process a receipt was not practical.

The most significant shortcoming was that none of these apps offered automatic categorization of purchased products. Manually editing records felt inefficient, especially in an era where artificial intelligence could potentially handle this task more accurately and quickly.

This led me to the idea of developing my own service to analyze grocery receipts, automatically categorize each product, and provide detailed expense statistics by category and store. This system would allow us to identify the categories that consume the largest portion of our budget and optimize our spending accordingly. Additionally, it would enable us to scrutinize our family's food habits to make healthier choices (e.g., spending less on chips and more on vegetables). Keeping a close watch on our expenses in general would also be beneficial.

The journey from idea to implementation took considerable time, during which the project evolved with new features and adjustments. Some aspects had to be abandoned. There were also challenges with setting up categories. Fortunately, these difficulties have been overcome, and I am pleased to announce that the project is now up and running.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Stay tuned for more updates as I continue to refine and enhance this tool.