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.”
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