I made a free API for promotions and brochures from Bila, Lidl, Fantastico and Kaufland

Hello,

In recent months, a number of platforms for monitoring food prices have emerged, but most only use data from NSI or KZP. Now the euro is here and I think it is extremely important that the prices are transparent and accessible, so I made an open API for the prices of the products from the brochures of the 4 biggest supermarkets – Bila, Fantastico, Lidl and Kaufland.

I trained the yolov8 object detection model by manually annotating over 500 pages of brochures. I built a scraping workflow to pull the brochures themselves, and combine OCR + a cheap Vision Model to extract information about each product and enrichment – name, price lev, price euro, old price, etc.

The data is proprietary and it took some time to set up all this workflow + storage, but I decided to provide it completely free of charge. The idea is that devs in BG can build platforms for more transparency of food prices and real inflation. I’m already partnered with znamcenite.bg and would love to see more great projects built with my API.

If anyone wants to use the API or has any questions about the implementation, drop me a line. Can you give feedback? I’m interested in what you think about the project, what use cases you see, and if there’s anything you’d like to see in the API.

https://price-barometer.vercel.app/