Community Prices

Community Prices compares what you pay for groceries with what other shoppers near you pay, without giving up your privacy. You contribute anonymized prices only, never your receipt images or anything that identifies you, and in return you see the typical prices in your area: for products you already buy, and for products you have never bought.

Where area prices appear

Once your area has published prices, they appear in three places in the receipt reports:

• the Area Prices report, which lists the products with published prices near you;
• a “Your area” diamond on each product’s price strip in Stores & Savings;
• a shaded band in Price History showing the typical price range near you.

Taking part

To take part, turn on Anonymized price contribution in Settings. It is off until you choose to turn it on, and you can turn it off again at any time. After your first scan, the app asks once whether you want to contribute, on a “Contribute to Community Prices?” prompt with Contribute and Not now buttons; neither is pre-selected, so the choice is yours.

Why is contributing off by default? Your receipts are private unless you decide otherwise. Contributing only the prices, never the images or anything that identifies you, is what makes a community comparison possible without giving up your privacy, so it is something you opt into rather than out of.

When area prices appear

Once enough shoppers near you have contributed, area prices appear automatically. The comparison is grouped to your ZIP code, your city, your state, or the country, whichever has enough shoppers to compare fairly. Area prices always come from 20 or more shoppers; a single shopper’s prices are never shown on their own.

Seeing the comparison is a fair exchange: it stays open as long as you are contributing and have scanned at least one receipt in the last month. If you stop scanning for a while, the comparison pauses with a note in the report, and it returns with your next scan. Your own price history is never affected.

If your area does not have enough contributed prices yet, the Area Prices report shows your progress toward unlocking it. The more neighbors who contribute, the sooner local prices appear for everyone there.

Correcting a receipt

Correcting a product name on a receipt does not affect what you contribute. Names are never part of the shared data, so fixing one costs you nothing.

Corrections that change what a price means do withdraw that receipt from the shared data: the price itself, the quantity, the unit, or the kind of product an item is. Those are the things area prices are built from, so a receipt you have adjusted stops standing as a record of what a product cost. The rest of your receipts are unaffected, and the next one you scan contributes as usual.

What if you stop contributing or delete your account? Turning off Anonymized price contribution stops contributing new prices. It does not pull back what you already contributed: your earlier prices stay in the anonymized community data, and deleting your account removes them from everything except the published anonymized statistics. When you delete your account, your receipts and their images are deleted too, except receipts in a budget that has another owner, which stay with that budget. The community statistics remain because they are anonymized and cannot be tied back to you.