Retailers know exactly what you'll pay. We think you should too.

The asymmetry

A supermarket knows the elasticity of every item it sells. It knows which stores can carry a higher price because the nearest competitor is nine miles away. It knows which items you check the price on and which you throw in the cart without looking. It runs experiments on this, continuously, with better data than most governments have.

You, meanwhile, have a vague feeling that eggs used to be cheaper.

That's the asymmetry we're interested in. Not price gouging in the dramatic sense — the ordinary, legal, everyday kind, where two stores under the same banner charge different amounts for the same carton of milk and nobody is required to mention it.

Why receipts

There are companies that scrape retailer websites for prices. Those feeds are fast, broad, and frequently wrong — online prices diverge from shelf prices, promotions don't resolve, and store-level variation vanishes into a regional average.

A receipt has none of those problems. It's what a real person was actually charged, at a real store, on a real day, with the tax and the loyalty discount already applied. It's the ground truth. The catch is that receipts are annoying to digitise, which is why nobody had built this properly. So we spent our effort there: make capture nearly free, and the data takes care of itself.

Why other people matter

Your own receipts tell you whether you are paying more than you used to. That's useful. But it can't tell you whether you're paying more than the person three neighbourhoods over — and that's the number that actually changes behaviour.

So BudgetScope pools price signals across users, and only price signals. When somebody near you paid less for the same item, you hear about the gap. You don't hear about them. There is no social graph here, no leaderboard, no shopping-list influencer economy. Just the one fact you were missing.