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Inspiration

What it does

The idea for this project came from a very real, everyday problem we kept running into: deciding what to cook, then realizing we had no clear way to know which grocery store would actually be the cheapest for that meal. We noticed that while grocery apps are good at showing individual product prices, they don’t help when you’re trying to shop optimally by recipe. Comparing ingredients across multiple stores, especially while thinking about distance or dietary needs like halal, vegetarian, or organic options, quickly became tedious and frustrating. That gap between how people plan meals and how grocery prices are presented is what motivated us to build this project.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we faced was figuring out how to translate a real-world idea into structured logic. We had to learn how to break recipes into ingredient lists, match those ingredients against store inventories, handle missing items, and then rank stores in a way that felt fair and understandable. On top of that, making filters work correctly, especially after UI changes, taught us how tightly connected frontend design and backend logic really are. Small layout changes could break the functionality, which forced us to have to slow down, debug carefully, and truly understand how forms, data binding, and state worked together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A major accomplishment for us was getting the app to feel intuitive instead of overwhelming. We learned that showing why a store ranked best is just as important as showing which store ranked best. Highlighting the cheapest option, grouping related information visually, and keeping everything aligned helped turn a lot of data into something users could quickly understand. We also gained confidence working through bugs, restructuring code, and improving the user experience incrementally rather than trying to make everything perfect at once.

What we learned

Overall, this project taught us how to think more like product designers and not just writing code. We learned how to build around real user behavior, how to balance the functionality of the webapp with clarity, and how small UX decisions can dramatically change how useful an application feels. Especially as beginner coders, this project showed us that an idea that starts with a simple frustration can turn into a practical solution when approached thoughtfully.

Built With

• c#
• cshtml
• css
• next.js
• visual-studio