CartLens

CartLens — GPS-verified crowdsourced physical-shelf price index: in-store price observations captured by shoppers standing inside the store, keyed to store node + product + timestamp, spanning grocery, pharmacy, hardware, electronics and apparel — including localized markdowns and clearance prices that never appear in online listings or delivery-app APIs.. Very small (single-founder, San Francisco, no disclosed funding) but the artifact type is the rarest in this category: price observations with in-store provenance and a chain-of-custody flag, covering categories beyond grocery. Volume today…

CartLens offers (Alternative, Price, Geospatial) — est. thousands to low tens of thousands of verified price nodes — a local-first pilot targeting roughly 20+ stores per zone across the SF Bay Area and Oakland, so dense in a few ZIP clusters and empty elsewhere.

Out-of-store inflation and shrinkflation measurement at the physical shelf (clearance and localized markdown capture, which online scraping structurally cannot see); pharmacy and hardware price-comparison research; computer-vision OCR training on real shelf-tag imagery in variable lighting; retail price-integrity and advertised-versus-actual audit; regional price-dispersion and consumer-affordability indices.

The data is with 1 years of history.

Coverage spans US; Supermarkets, Application Software; alternative, price, geospatial; equities.