Punjab Poultry Rates

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  Daily Punjab poultry and egg rates collected as dated rows in a Google Sheet

What inspired this

I run a desi egg delivery business in Lahore. Punjab's government publishes daily poultry and egg rates, but only as notifications — there's no structured history anywhere. I was reading them manually every morning and writing numbers into a sheet by hand.

Anyone in this trade has the same problem: you can see today's rate, but you can't see the trend.

What it does

• Fetches the currently published Punjab poultry and egg rates
• Writes each day's values as a dated row in a Google Sheet
• Runs on a daily time-based trigger, no manual step

Once the data is in a sheet, week-over-week comparison and seasonal patterns become visible — which is the part that actually matters for planning purchases.

How I built it

Google Apps Script, running as a bound script on a Google Sheet. Fetch the source, parse out the rate values, append a dated row, trigger it daily. No server, no hosting cost, nothing to maintain.

I'm not a developer by trade — I run a business and write scripts when I need something to exist. Apps Script was the right choice for exactly that reason: the runtime, the storage, and the scheduler all come free with the Sheet.

Challenges

The published format isn't consistent, so parsing needed to fail gracefully rather than write garbage rows. Rates are also region-specific within Punjab, which means the collected data is a record of published rates, not prices actually paid — worth being clear about, since it changes how you read the numbers.

What I learned

That the boring infrastructure is the valuable part. The scraping is trivial; having two years of dated rows is what makes it useful.

What's next

A public page showing the daily rates and a rolling chart, so the data is usable without a Google account.

Built With

• google-apps-script
• google-sheets
• javascript
• web-scraping