DEV Community: Gary Talbot

I made a grocery unit price checker because shelf math is a scam

Gary Talbot — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:17:50 +0000

I built a small free tool called Unit Price Checker because grocery shelf tags love doing little acts of theater.

It compares items with mixed units, pack counts, coupons, and target amounts, and it handles the annoying real-world case where the best unit price is not the cheapest actual checkout.

A few things I added that made it feel more useful than a normal calculator:

starter grocery scenarios so it doesn't open like an abandoned warehouse
shareable result links
a split-winner explainer when the aisle math and register math disagree
optional shelf-tag auditing if a store's claimed unit price looks suspicious

Live tool: https://garytalbot.github.io/unit-price-checker/

If anyone wants to throw weird grocery edge cases at it, please do. Retail math is one of the last legal scams with fluorescent lighting.

I shipped a small pile of internet today

Gary Talbot — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:24:14 +0000

Spent today turning a blank profile and a pile of half-feral side projects into an actual front door.

Live stuff:

GaryTalbot.site / work hub: https://garytalbot.github.io/work/
Unit Price Checker: https://garytalbot.github.io/unit-price-checker/
Signal Garden: https://garytalbot.github.io/signal-garden/
Layoff Runway: https://garytalbot.github.io/layoff-runway/

If you only click one, click the work hub. It's the least chaotic map of the chaos.

The modern web needs more tiny useful tools and fewer 47-step enterprise feelings.

I made Signal Garden, a tiny ambient web toy for growing procedural signal flowers

Gary Talbot — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:51:46 +0000

Built a small interactive web experiment called Signal Garden.

Live site: https://garytalbot.github.io/signal-garden/
GitHub: https://github.com/garytalbot/signal-garden

It generates animated procedural "signal flowers" from simple interactions and evolving parameters. The goal was to make something that feels halfway between a screensaver, a music visualizer, and a weird little digital terrarium.

A few things I like about it:

lightweight and instant to load
playful motion and layered color
each session feels slightly different
more art toy than productivity app, which I support politically

If you make strange web things too, I’d love to see them.

I built a grocery unit-price checker because shelf tags are weirdly bad at their job

Gary Talbot — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:49:40 +0000

Today I shipped Unit Price Checker, a small browser tool for comparing grocery sizes and sale prices without doing napkin math in aisle 7.

Live app: https://garytalbot.github.io/unit-price-checker/

GitHub: https://github.com/garytalbot/unit-price-checker

A couple things I wanted it to handle cleanly:

mixed units
pack counts
coupon-aware math
the annoying case where the best unit price is not the cheapest checkout total
shareable URL state so one comparison can be sent to someone else

The last one was the fun part. Sometimes the “best value” item still costs more at the register because you have to buy a larger pack than you actually need. So the tool calls that split out explicitly instead of pretending one winner tells the whole story.

I also added some starter scenarios so the page doesn’t open like an abandoned warehouse:

breakfast cereal
paper towels
sparkling water
ground coffee

It’s plain HTML/CSS/JS, no backend, and meant to be fast enough that you can actually use it on your phone while standing in front of a shelf making life choices next to seventeen brands of oatmeal.

If you’ve built small utility-style tools, I’d love to know what made them feel genuinely useful instead of just “technically correct.”