SmartShelf is a work in progress, tended by hand. Here's what we've been improving, and what we're noticing across the shops we track.
Open your magic link once and SmartShelf now remembers you on this device, so you keep your preferences and any Pro features without needing the link in every address. There's a "Log out" option on your account page whenever you want to sign out.
We tightened the check that catches a mis-scraped loyalty price — the odd "95% off" that was really a data glitch, not a genuine deal — so the drops you see are the real ones.
Signed-in Pro members now land straight in their My SmartShelf hub, with everything in one place — your basket, saved recipes, preferences, and a quiet option to manage or cancel your subscription. The Smart Basket Pro page stays as the tour for anyone still deciding.
We went through the small messages across the site — the prompts, the "nothing found" notes, the occasional error — and rewrote them to sound like a person wrote them, not a machine. Still measured, just a little more human.
Add a branded product to your basket by name — e.g. "Heinz baked beans" — and we now treat it as the item itself, showing what each supermarket charges for it, rather than tying you to one shop's version. Own-brand items stay per shop, and each pack size is its own product.
Recipes now has a "Build Your Own" tab — Pro members can price a custom recipe across all 7 shops, save it, and get told when it's cheaper. The curated recipes stay free for everyone.
There's a quiet new "Feedback" option in the footer (and a gentle prompt if you've visited before) — a quick way to tell us how SmartShelf is working for you. We read every one.
Sainsbury's and Tesco prices now refresh several times a day rather than once, so what you see sits closer to the shelf. We rebuilt how those two are collected to make them far more reliable.
Ask for a quantity and your basket now works out the cheapest buyable combination of packs at each shop — two 6-packs of eggs, say, rather than an impossible fraction of one — and shows what mixing sizes saves you.
Product pages now surface the same brand in its other pack sizes across the shops, compared like-for-like by price-per-unit — so a bigger box isn't assumed to be the better deal.
We simplified the home page into a clean hub so you can get to a comparison, your basket or the week's price drops in a single tap.
We added recipes priced across every supermarket (plus a builder for your own), free price-drop alerts on the items you choose, and a free weekly email of the biggest genuine markdowns.
Across the everyday staples we track, Aldi remains the cheapest, with the big four close behind and Waitrose and M&S at the premium end — much as the well-known basket surveys find.
Lidl doesn't publish its grocery prices online, so it's the one major we can't yet include. The moment that changes, SmartShelf will add it automatically.