Price data is free. Automation is the paid part.
A price is a fact, not a service. Looking up a price, reading a shelf tag or seeing a markdown never costs anything and is never metered. What costs money is the automatic work: reading your receipt with a vision model, checking every purchase against dated markdown tags every day, and telling you which ones may be worth a price adjustment within 30 days.
Free vs Pro
- Unlimited in-store price lookups and markdown history
- The 12 biggest in-store markdowns on the home page
- Full 30-day price-adjustment facts on public item pages
- No email address and no receipt required
- Full markdown index, every unexpired tag we have photographed
- Upload a receipt photo, app screenshot or Costco-exported PDF
- 1 receipt upload each week; a rejected file still uses it up
- A weekly email with anything you can claim and the week's new markdowns
- Your saved receipts, personal spending report and 30-day matches
- Unlimited receipt uploads, with no weekly allowance
- Import your whole Costco receipt history from a spreadsheet
- A weekly email with anything you can claim and the week's new markdowns
- Instant 30-day price-match checks on every receipt you upload
- Priority alerts ahead of the free queue; push and SMS later
- All price data remains free and public — Pro buys automation, never facts
Flat subscription only — we never take a cut of the money you get back. Chasing a percentage of a refund means auditing receipts, which is exactly the manual work this project exists to avoid.
Why $24 a year
One markdown on a big-ticket item is commonly $50–200; the largest tag we have photographed is $400.00 off. A single successful adjustment pays for several years of Pro, which is why we would rather price this low and let the tool prove itself. Small items that drop a few dollars are not worth a special trip to the membership counter, so the home page shows TVs, laptops and appliances rather than groceries.
Both plans renew automatically. Cancel whenever you like from your account page — access stays active until the end of the paid period, and we never take a cut of any refund you receive.
Why we do not charge per markdown notice
Charging by the number of markdown messages sounds fair until you ask who counts them. It would put a price on each saving we find, give us a reason to hold tags back, and make a member hesitate before opening an alert that might be worth $50. Worse, the same information would cost two people different amounts depending on how many items they bought. So notice counts are not a billing unit here: information is free, and the subscription pays for the automatic work around it.
Warehouse coverage
We are doing one warehouse properly before adding a second. Coverage is public so you can tell whether any of this data applies to your store.
| Warehouse | Tagged items | Markdown tags | Last tag seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Richmond, BC | 1319 | 145 | Nov 8, 2026 |
Markdowns are store-local: Richmond and Burnaby often run different promotions. Every markdown row carries a warehouse and a date range, and a receipt only matches when both sides name the same store. We only record warehouse prices — web prices are a different number and are not used here.
Where things stand today
- Works now: one receipt upload a week for free accounts, exact item-number matching against dated in-store markdowns and official warehouse promotions, the 30-day countdown on your receipts, a weekly summary email, a personal spending report, and the full markdown index for registered members.
- Now live: billing through Stripe — subscribe on this page. Pro adds unlimited uploads, a whole-history spreadsheet import and no weekly cap. Next: a second warehouse.
- Never shown as if it were true: an estimated refund is an estimate, not a promise of money. Costco decides the adjustment at the membership counter, and its rules can change.
Privacy and fine print
A receipt photo, an app screenshot or a Costco-exported PDF is used once by the vision model to read the item numbers, printed short names, prices and purchase date, then discarded. We do not store the file, do not show it to other visitors, and do not keep the membership number, your name, the last four digits of a card or any transaction number printed on it. Only the rows you confirm are saved, under your account, and they are what feed your personal report and the 30-day check. A markdown amount printed on a receipt is reference only: it has no sale dates and can never open a claim window.
PriceTrace is an independent project run from British Columbia, Canada. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Costco Wholesale. Prices are facts we observed, not official Costco data; confirm at the membership counter before asking for an adjustment.