Nearbuy

Inspiration

Nearbuy started from two real experiences. While working with small stores in Germany, we discovered that many were run by older owners who had great products but almost no online visibility. Most didn’t know how to set up digital tools, meaning people around them had no idea what they sold. The second moment happened here at the hackathon: Our Founder Linus arrived in Vilnius, forgot his MacBook charger, and had no idea where to find one. Google Maps showed stores but not inventory, and no tool could tell him where the charger was actually in stock and where it was the cheapest. These two situations made the problem clear: local products are often invisible for people, even when they’re right around the corner.

What It Does

Nearbuy makes local inventory searchable. Users can type any product and instantly see which nearby stores have it, how much it costs, how far it is, and AI-recommended alternatives if the exact match isn’t available. It also offers a grocery list optimizer that finds the cheapest nearby basket. Shops upload their inventory in minutes and immediately gain the online visibility they’ve been missing.

How We Built It

We built Nearbuy using tools like Lovable, Gemini, ScreenStudio, WhyTheDuck, Canva, and Google Cloud services. Our AI model uses embeddings to understand product similarity and ranks results by match accuracy, price, and distance to deliver fast, helpful search results.

Challenges We Ran Into

We had to clean messy store data, design onboarding simple enough for non-technical shop owners, and ensure product matching was accurate. We also needed to keep AI responses fast and make the value instantly clear to both users and stores.

Accomplishments We’re Proud Of

We built a working local product search engine, created a reliable AI recommendation system, onboarded real stores, and designed a simple user experience that people intuitively understand.

What We Learned

Local inventory is practically invisible, and people struggle every day to find basic items nearby. Small shops want visibility but lack the tools. A clear, AI-powered interface can solve both sides of the problem at once. Also a right time-, risk- & capacity management and good research is more important than expected

What’s Next for Nearbuy

We plan to launch the full MVP, build mobile a app to make it more intuitive to use, scale store onboarding, implement automated scraping, expand city by city, and introduce store subscriptions and promoted listings to power the business while keeping Nearbuy free for everyday users.