Ruoka

The problem

Food prices keep moving, and a receipt tells you what you paid, but not whether it was a good price, what went up since last month or what the cheaper choice would have been.

What it does

• Downloads your Lidl Plus receipts (the whole history) and shows spending per month, category and product, plus a basket index: what the things you buy cost now compared with a year ago.
• Follows the store’s whole shelf price list, about 37,000 products, every day and keeps only the changes. That gives every product a price history and warns when something you buy regularly gets more expensive.
• Checks each receipt line against the shelf price at the time and flags lines that were charged more.
• Finds cheaper alternatives by price per kilo and per 100 g of protein, using pack sizes and nutrition data from Open Food Facts.
• Matches this week’s Lidl and K-Ruoka offers against what you actually buy, and suggests stocking up on long-life products you use when they are at least 20 % off.
• Coupon autopilot (opt-in): activates your Lidl Plus coupons so none are forgotten at the checkout, keeps a log of what it activated, and shows how far you are from this month’s bonus coupon.
• Understands searches like lactose-free yoghurt under 2 €: code reads the price limit and an AI model turns the rest into filters.

How it’s built

• TypeScript on Node 24 with its built-in SQLite. One core serves both a command-line tool and a phone-first web app (Hono API, React and Vite), in Finnish and English.
• A background refresher keeps the offers and the price lists current and respects each source’s rate limits.
• All the data stays in one database file on your own machine.