The idea for Bounty is four years old. The code is six weeks old.
That gap is the most honest thing I can tell you about this project. Bounty sat in my head from sometime in 2022 — when grocery prices in Calgary stopped making sense to me — until mid-February 2026, when I finally opened a code editor. I'm not embarrassed about the four years. I think they were necessary.
The thing I noticed in 2022
I'd be standing at a Calgary Co-op or a Safeway, looking at a price tag with a yellow sticker that said "Club Price" or "Sale" or "Member Special," and I genuinely couldn't tell whether the number was a deal or a normal price dressed up to look like one. I checked the apps — flyers, mostly, or collections of flyer data. They told me what was on sale this week, which is a different question than what's a normal price.
Take Campbell's Mushroom Soup — I use it as a recipe base, or just lunch. I've watched its price climb for four years, and somewhere along the way I stopped being able to trust my own memory of what it used to cost. Is the sale sign a deal, or just a number on yellow paper? Should I stock up, or wait? The can that cost roughly a dollar in 2022 is now pushing two-fifty. That's a staple. That adds up. And I'd like to know — actually know — when I'm standing in front of it, whether the price on the tag is worth it.
That's where Bounty came from. A way to answer that question — not just for myself — fed by everyone who happened to be standing in front of a price tag right now.
Why it took four years
Two honest reasons.
The first is that I'm not someone who asks for help easily. To build something like this in 2022 I would have needed to assemble a team — mobile developer, backend developer, designer — and convince each of them to work for equity in something that didn't exist yet. That's the part of being a founder I'm not good at, and I knew it.
The second is that the technology wasn't there for one person to build it alone. Computer vision in 2022 wasn't reliable enough to read chaotic grocery shelf tags at scale, and the cost of using it made solo projects like this impractical.
So I waited. Not on purpose. I just kept living my life, and the idea kept sitting in my head.
What changed in February
A few things converged.
Computer vision technology got good enough, and the cost came down. The tooling for building software got dramatically better for solo developers — the "I'd need a whole team" problem stopped being true.
And I found out I was being laid off. Suddenly I had time on my hands and went a little enthusiastic on this little project.
Grocery prices in Calgary had stopped being a complaint and started being a crisis. The thing I'd been quietly noticing for four years became something people around me talked about every week. At some point I realized that not doing anything about it had stopped being prudence and started being procrastination.
In mid-February I opened a code editor and started.
This is the first of two posts about how Bounty came to exist. The next one is about what's been built since February — and why I'm finally writing about it in public.
— Elmer