Hello everyone,

I want to introduce you to an open-source project I’ve been building called Price Compass.

The goal is simple: empower international price transparency through open, verifiable data. Traditional cost-of-living indexes offer “black box” metrics, where you just have to trust their final number. Price Compass serves both aggregated insights and the underlying raw data. Every single price is tagged with a vendor name, timestamp, and a direct link to the product so users can verify, audit, and calculate their own economic indicators.

Why this matters

• Custom “Shopping Baskets”: Instead of relying on generic averages, you can build a personalized monthly cart reflecting what you actually consume (e.g., 10L milk, 2 gym memberships, 1 transit pass). This means you no longer have to blindly believe the media or political propaganda comparing international costs of living, you can truly, independently, and verifiably see the real numbers across borders for yourself.
• On-the-Fly Aggregation: Switch between Average, Minimum, or Maximum modes to see the full market spectrum instantly.
• Historical Indicators & Auditing: Because the system tracks and stores raw data over time, you can look back at historical data points to independently reconstruct and verify inflation rates and other economic indicators. Instead of just accepting a government’s official CPI (Consumer Price Index) percentage at face value, you have the historical ledger to audit how prices actually shifted on the ground.

Where it stands right now

The frontend is a fast, static page. It is about 70% functional for two countries: Denmark and Hungary.

• GitHub Repository: https://github.com/nlevi-dev/PriceCompass
• Live Pre-release: https://nlevi-dev.github.io/PriceCompass (Features a few days of historic test data)

The Catch (And why I need you)

I love this concept, but I recently hit a wall. After a 2-month pause due to burnout, I returned to find that 1 data source had shut down entirely and 4 others had changed their interfaces. To get back to where I left off, I have to rewrite one scraper from scratch and rework 4 others.

As we all know, scraper-based projects don’t have a finish line. They require constant maintenance as vendors update their sites, making it effectively a part-time job with no end in sight. I don’t have that kind of free time, and writing/rewriting scrapers isn’t how I want to spend my weekends.

How We Can Move Forward (My Proposal)

Right now, the code is a bit of a mess following the burnout pause, and the broken scrapers mean the data is frozen. However, I still deeply believe in this mission. If there is genuine community interest, I am willing to pick this project back up.

Here is what I am looking to gauge before diving back in:

1. User Interest & Crowdfunding: Would you actually use a tool like this? If the interest is there, I’d consider setting up a non-binding community fund (like Patreon or GoFundMe) down the line to help cover general project costs.
2. Future Contributors: If you are a developer, data scientist, or open-source enthusiast, would you want to contribute? I’d love to connect with anyone who wants to help expand regional data or collaborate on building a more resilient data architecture.

My commitment to you: If this post gets traction and validates that people want Price Compass to exist, I will commit to jumping back in. I will clean up the codebase, write proper documentation, fix the broken Danish and Hungarian scrapers, and set it up as a clean, welcoming environment for community contributions.

Is a transparent, auditable cost-of-living tool something the community actually wants, or am I shouting into the void? Let me know your thoughts, critiques, or if you’d be down to help build this!