by For The Consumers LLC
A price comparison tool built for one reason: to actually help people save money on their everyday purchases.
Why This Exists
Price per unit is one of the best metrics to get a quick understanding of the value of similar items. This is why many states mandate that this information be shown in grocery stores. But this metric is seen as a threat to many companies who don't want you to know too much about costs and value. This metric easily exposes shady practices like shrinkflation.
So I wanted to use this price per unit, or unit price, system to be the bedrock of this website. But seeing a single product's unit price is not super helpful. To get more out of this metric, you'd need to be able to compare with other products' unit prices. Even better: be able to evaluate options across multiple retailers as well! This is the main goal of this website; to help people see the true value of everyday goods.
Not only is it helpful to sort by price per unit, it is very important to be able to have similar products use the same unit. One day I was shopping for some produce and this happened: One package of cherry tomatoes is listed per 100ct, one is in grams, one is in ounces, and another is in fluid ounces; "what the hell!?" I was standing in front of those shiny red little things for too long, trying to do the calculations in my head. That's why I made For The Consumers' first website auto-convert measurement units into identical user-selected units. However, it is more than just wanting to make a helpful tool. But more on that later.
These companies want to obfuscate information on the products you buy. Well, I want to un-obfuscate that data, if that is even a word. You can call me Toto, because I am trying to pull back the curtain as much as I can.
How It Works
Price Per Unit
Price per unit is one of the best metrics to get a good understanding of the value of similar items. This is why many states mandate that this information be shown in grocery stores. But this metric is seen as a threat to many companies who don't want you to know too much about costs and value. This metric easily exposes shady practices such as shrinkflation.
Multiple Retailers
Search across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and all Kroger stores. I aim to add as many retailers as possible, with or without any financial arrangement with them. My goal is coverage, not commissions. If you want your searches to go faster, filter out retailers in the settings panel.
Your Units, Your Way
Switch between metric and imperial in settings. Price per unit displays in whatever unit makes sense to you: grams, ounces, liters, fluid ounces, etc. Everything is converted to a common base unit; so a 12 fl oz can and a 2 liter bottle are instantly comparable. 12 fl oz vs 67.63 fl oz, no mental math required.
+ Add To Search
Want to see multiple different items all in one search: chicken, tofu, and beef? No problem, add search terms to one big search. Either use a comma "," to enter multiple terms at once, or click the + Add To Search button next to the normal Search button. Works on all search pages!
Pages
This is the main part of the site. Search multiple retailers (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger) all at the same time! Lots of filtering and sorting tools at your disposal. Use the + Add To Search button to add more search terms to the same results list.
This is the start of the next big expansion that I am working on.
What it is now
A useful tool to discover things like which products have the most protein for the least amount of money.Price Per Consumption Unit compares products by the real-world cost of actually using them. For example: ground coffee vs pods vs instant. What's the cost per cup? More info in the PPCU section below.
Want to compare similar products that usually require separate searches like: cow's milk, almond milk, and oat milk? Pin any product with the orange pin icon, then head to the Compare Page; which will let you see all the products from different searches in the same place.
When you don't want to do online checkout, and would rather go to a physical store, use the Shopping List feature on this website. Not sure what else I could say about it; you check things off the list as you shop.
Curious what others are searching for? This is the place to see that. It is also how the Home page populates its data, but this is a place where you can see that info without all the fancy visuals. My dad always said, "Keep it simple, stupid." This is the home page, but stupid… or simple, im not sure. Maybe my dad had a point.
This shows all products the site has found through various searches. The nice thing about this page: it doesn't cost me any money, unlike the others, because it doesn't actively scrape data. It's made from the results of previous data scrapping. So… you know, use it. It is great! lol.
Want to keep an eye on the price of certain products? This will let you do just that. If people use this enough, I will expand it to notify you when prices meet set limits, so you can be alerted when a product falls to a certain price. But that likely requires a profile system, which I may or may not build.
This is this. It is what this is, you are here already, congrats.
Technically not a page, but it might turn into one in the future. It's where you twist knobs and pull levers to change things, enjoy. Please don't break anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
How This Site Is Funded
Along with my time for development and maintenance, the site uses data scraping to get data from retailers, and that costs money for every search. I hate ads, so I don't want to put any on the site. I want to make this accessible to everyone, especially those who could benefit the most from saving some money on groceries, so I don't want to put it behind a paywall or subscription. I also don't want to sell user data, which is why I don't use any third-party analytics tools that do. So the best options I currently have are affiliate links and directly accepting money from anyone generous enough to give me a few bucks.
More info over at , up above.
Affiliate Links
Currently I only have one retailer giving affiliate commissions: Amazon. Products that have an affiliate link will have a little Ⓐ badge near them. But I include links to retailers where I have no affiliate relationship at all. If a retailer without an affiliate relationship has the better price, I'll show you the link. I'm not going to hide the best deal because it doesn't pay me anything. That would defeat the entire point of this site, and just be gross. I am honestly just really happy to build something that might actually help people. I am tired of every website, company, etc. just trying to make money at every freaking turn.
With that said, if you find this tool useful and want to support it via affiliate links, you can limit your searches to only affiliate links by adjusting your settings. Affiliate links do not increase your cost at all. Also, there are shady things like the Honey Chrome extension that try to steal affiliate commissions, so please be aware of that. Thanks for your support!!
Donations
If you are feeling extremely generous and would like to give directly, I have set up a few ways you can give. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who gives in this way.
Thank you again, seriously.
If the cost of running this ever becomes unsustainable, I may look into other options. I doubt this will happen since I run this operation quite lean. I'm also not going to compromise the mission to keep the lights on.
Price Per Consumption Unit (PPCU)
Many products are easier to compare when you know the cost per real-world consumption unit, not just the cost per ounce or per fluid ounce. For example, coffee grounds, instant coffee, and coffee pods all have very different weights per serving. How much of each makes a cup of coffee? For grounds, it is typically 2-3 tablespoons; instant coffee is 1-2 teaspoons; while one pod makes 1 cup. By calculating the price per consumption unit, we can give you a more apples-to-apples comparison of the true cost of using each product.
When we can determine a product's serving size, we display a PPCU (1 serving) line on the product card and highlight the card with a gold border. Products can be sorted and filtered by "Price Per Consumption Unit" using the sort controls.
How serving sizes are determined
We use a multi-step process to find the most reliable serving size for each product:
- Title parsing - For medications, supplements, pods, and other clearly-counted items, we extract the count directly from the product name (e.g., "200 Tablets", "30 Pods").
- FDA RACC table - For common foods and beverages, we apply the FDA's Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed (21 CFR 101.12). This is the same standard used on Nutrition Facts labels. For example, 1 cup (240 mL) for milk and juice, or 45 g for a serving of grains.
- USDA FoodData Central - For branded food products not covered by RACC, we query a local copy of the USDA's branded food database. If no local match is found, we fall back to the live USDA API.
- OpenFDA NDC directory - For over-the-counter medications and supplements, we use the FDA's National Drug Code directory to look up package counts.
But even with all that, we can't always find a reliable serving size for every product, so not all products have this info. All products that have a PPCU line get a yellow-gold highlight and a PPCU value. This system is still in Beta. There are often mess-ups that I am working to fix. There are toggles to turn this system on or off. If you want to help make the system better, please let me know when you find errors. There is a dedicated space in the Discord for you to do so.
Important Limitations
- Serving sizes are estimates based on government databases and product titles - they may not match the actual Nutrition Facts label for every product.
- The USDA database search uses keyword matching, so a product may occasionally be matched to a similar-but-different food item.
- Products shown without a PPCU line simply didn't match any of our serving-size sources - this doesn't reflect on their quality or value.
- Serving data is cached for up to 7 days. Newly released products may not have serving data immediately.
More of My Thoughts
Look, capitalism pushes companies to chase growth no matter what. It starts out by companies trying to make better products, neat. But growth in profits that never stops starts to manifest some pretty bad anti-consumer policies over time. No, I am not some radical, and I don't know what economic policy is the right one; they all have issues. All I am focused on here is some of the issues that come in the later stages of capitalism.
The act of pursuing as much profit as possible goes against openly informing the public. One of the main jobs of companies is to obfuscate information as much as possible. An even more lucrative thing is to trick people into thinking they need xyz. Have you ever heard a successful salesperson say things like "I could sell water to the ocean" or "I can sell sun to a farmer"? In other words, they manipulated someone to spend their money on something they did not need. Cool…
But back to muddying information: I have not found any major retailer or popular shopping tools like Instacart that let their users sort products by price per unit. Not a single one. Sure, they display the information, but they only do so because it is required by law in many states. They let you sort by total price, by ratings, by "Recommended," but they don't let you sort by price per unit.
Also, have you noticed how small the price per unit price is in stores, and on their websites it is sometimes written in light grey text on a white background? It is beyond clear that this data scares them. That is why I created this website. Because frankly… screw these companies. I'm tired of them doing whatever the hell they want to do. They have way too much power, so if I can take even a teeny tiny bit away from them, then I can sleep a little better at night. An even better thing is if I could convince people to buy local when they can. To hope people don't even use this website, because at the end of the day it is still supporting these mega corps, but, as Voltaire said "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien"
This is the first project from For The Consumers LLC, a company I formed with a single goal: fight back against the issues that stem from late stage capitalism. I have more projects planned, all built around a shared idea of giving people tools to become more informed and empowered consumers. I think it's pretty neato, and I hope you do too. :)
What's Next
This is the first of many projects from For The Consumers LLC. The roadmap for this site includes more retailers, price-drop tracking, and smarter comparison tools. Longer term, I plan to build more tools aimed at the same goal: fighting the issues that late stage capitalism creates, AKA un-obfuscating information that companies work hard to make as confusing as possible. AKA Being little Toto.
- Saved shopping lists with automatic best-value suggestions.
- More retailers - with or without affiliate relationships.
- Browser Extensions, for per retailer website tools.
- Price history and drop alerts.
- Customize Consumption Units.
- Profile creation (Not sure, will ask the community).
- Mobile App.
- Camera identification system for in store shopping assistance.
- Recipes with per-serving costs to really see the value of home cooking.
- Filler additives finder.
- And more!
Release Notes
Technical details about recent changes. Most users can safely ignore this, it's here for the curious.
New Pages & Features
- Nutrition Explorer (/nutrition) - Analyze cost-per-nutrient across products. Compare $/Protein, $/Fiber, Protein/Calorie, and many other combinations. Run multiple searches side-by-side and save named search lists that replay as a batch in one click.
- Product Pages (/product/…) - Individual pages for each product in the database, with price history charts, nutrition facts per 100g, related products by category, and community notes.
- Browse Products (/products) - Paginated catalog of the full product database, filterable by name and unit type.
Search Improvements
- Cache layers - Search results are now cached in three layers (in-memory singleton → component session → browser localStorage). Refreshing the page or navigating away no longer triggers new API calls if your results are recent (2-hour window).
- Multi-search - Queue multiple search terms on the PPCU Explorer or Nutrition Explorer pages and run them all at once. Sessions are encoded in the URL so they survive a page refresh.
- Localized pricing - Enter your ZIP code once and get localized prices from Amazon, Walmart, and Target automatically.
PPCU Improvements
- Admin-curated Consumption Unit system: precise cost-per-serving for products with a defined serving size (e.g., cups of coffee, doses of medication). Admin-verified assignments show a gold ★ badge.
- Auto-match batch scanner suggests products that fit existing CU definitions.
Admin Tools (for internal use)
- Product merge candidates and merge history.
- Community error reports and notes moderation queue.
- Image enrichment: background back-fill of Amazon product images via Oxylabs.
- Nutrition admin: bulk editing of per-product macros, sync to database.
Infrastructure
- Anonymous self-hosted analytics (no IPs, no user IDs, 90-day auto-purge).
- Dynamic sitemap including all individual product pages.
- Per-page Open Graph meta tags and JSON-LD structured data for Google.
- Homepage redesigned with improved bubble search and background visuals.
Feedback?
Head to the tab to see the many ways you can get in contact with us. The best channel for feedback is our Discord:
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