About OpenPriceMap
Think GasBuddy for everything. OpenPriceMap is a community-built price map for NYC street food, bodegas, and carts. Every price you report makes the map better for everyone who shops after you.
Why this exists
Back in 2012, I was living in New York City and trying to eat on a budget. I kept noticing the same thing at every corner store: identical products priced wildly differently within a few blocks of each other. One bodega charged $1.99 for a yogurt. The next one charged $2.99. Same brand, same size, same week. After running the numbers on my groceries, I realized I was leaving real money on the table just because nobody had ever mapped this out.
So I built the first version of OpenPriceMap — a tool for logging what things actually cost where, with the long-term goal of solving a traveling-salesman problem for your shopping list.
Why the first attempt was hard
The 2012 version hit a wall fast. Typing a product name, a store, an address, a UPC, and a size on a phone while standing in line was too much friction. Data quality fell apart: misspellings created duplicate entries, sizes and brands were inconsistent, and no two stores labeled the same item the same way. Jet.com was the only company I saw that even partially cracked the problem of a unified product catalog across vendors — and they were a well-funded startup, not a side project.
Why now is different
Two things have changed. First, LLMs can do the boring normalization work that killed the old version: merging duplicate items, cleaning up fuzzy product names, extracting structured data from messy inputs. Tasks that used to need a data team can now run on a server. Second, grocery inflation since 2020 has turned "am I getting ripped off at this bodega" from a hobby question into a real one for a lot of people.
How it works
Every price on OpenPriceMap was reported by someone who was actually standing in front of the product. There is no editorial team and no scraped data. Prices are append-only — once a price is reported it is never overwritten, only added to — so the map is a real history of what things cost, not a single snapshot. You can browse the bacon egg and cheese, coffee, or halal platter pages to see the current NYC price range across every vendor we know about, or zoom in on a neighborhood like Midtown.
Who built this
Hi, I'm Jim Wallace. I'm a solo developer. The 2012 version was a weekend experiment that I shelved when the data problem got bigger than I could handle on my own; the current version is my second run at it now that the tools are finally ready. You can read the full launch post on my blog for more backstory.
How you can help
The map is live but the data is thin. If you are in NYC and you see a price for a BEC, a coffee, a halal platter, or anything else we track, take ten seconds to report it. Prolific reporters show up on the leaderboard, and every report you make helps the next person buy smarter. The core philosophy is simple: helping yourself helps everyone.