AI is getting cheap enough that you can process everything you see Built a Thrift Store Scanning Agent that processes video frames, looks up the price online and alerts you to good deals

Im shocked at how well this works. full build video →

goodwill workers gonna start wearing signal jammers lmao

Nice! I did something similar for pricing garage/yard sale items and was thinking of doing something similar to what you're doing with it later. Also this is way more fun than pricing items to sell

Ah great, I look forward to never finding something cool in a thrift store ever again since resellers have a new tool to scam us out of all the fun things in life.

The interesting part is when “process everything you see” stops sounding expensive and starts sounding normal. That changes a lot more than shopping apps.

the thrift-store agent can spot a $20 jacket priced like a $200 one, but eBay's active listings still aren't sold comps, and condition is where the real spreadsheet starts.

Yeah that’s badass!

Bro did you just make me look at code

@garyvee would be proud.

frame-rate is the real cost lever. Most 'scan everything' agents sample 1fps and call it real-time — 30fps burns 30x the tokens for maybe 5% more signal.

nice, i'd have had it texting me alerts by sunday night

How noisy do alerts get when frame matches pull conflicting prices?

Holy shit dude what have you just done to the FBA resellers

You know, this could be taken so much further. - For someone looking to save on battery or money, there could be a "capture photo" button instead of always capture photos to process. - The lidar on the phone could allow items to be highlighted and glow on the screen in real time so you know what is good. - Would be ideal to have a checkmark added to the items on the screen when it's been scanned. Much like the idea above so that you're not constantly looking around at the same thing. (you did this in video not knowing if it actually processed it all) - Would be cool to confirm that you're going to buy it and the app asks how much you'll pay for it to calculate that over time. - Needs to be able to connect to multiple agents like Claude and Grok, IMHO. This would be given by the user...? But I don't love that. - What would it look like to turn this into a subscription or pay-as-you-go model as an option where we pay you to give us a generous amount of scans per week/month instead of forcing people to add in their own API keys? Something I don't love doing. - I think we should do away with monthly subscriptions for small items like this. How cool would a weekly sub be for a place you don't often go to? - Would be cool to share your sub to someone else on the system. Like a son is going to the thrift store instead of the mother but the mother wants good stuff. - Should pay me for all of these swell ideas. :P

This is something on my "shelved todo list later of apps" .. forked + added.. - Instant prices, research only when needed - On-device object + barcode detection - Live price labels on the camera - Buy / negotiate / pass + max offer - US + Canada (USD/CAD) - Real comp math

A thrift store aisle is basically a Bloomberg terminal now. I love this and also hate what it will do to the good $5 finds.

How many frames per second are you sending to the model before the cost starts to add up?

Ebay API for price checks?

Its piped into the Ebay API, it can pull for Sale listings, but the Sold Listings data is only available on approal from ebay. So I'd like to get that somehow

built something close to this for coupon fraud once. the AI running my scanner priced a $4 thrift mug at $340 because it matched the wrong catalog photo. still not sure which of us learned more.

Wes you are so creative. I used to literally do this with a cheap barcode scanner and an app on my phone. And here you are building one just for fun. You are a machine dude

Wow. Very cool!

give it a year and every thrift store runs the same agent and prices everything at ebay prices

I had this idea last year at a massive 2nd hand store ... there was literally millions of items in this warehouse ... 4 floors ... you can't go through it all in 1 day. it was insane ... I was like ... man in a year, with AI vision, you could just look at it with your camera and it could flag the items for you that are underpriced.

Totally cheating 😂😂😂

the free eval set is your own behavior: what you actually picked up vs what you kept walking past. log every scan against that move and the matcher gets labels nobody had to annotate. price lookup is the easy part; precision at the rack is what keeps you reading the alerts.

Want to make a shitload of money? Instead of looking for deals, use this approach to scan inventory and index it. Build a consumer facing search engine for local shops. Price compare. Get stores on board with it. Charge for API access for Google et al. Charge brands for a supercharged store finder widget that actually knows what products retailers have. Sell ads on search results. - custom hardware could do a chicken head move to get more stable photos while walking - showing last scan dates would give people more confidence in what the results show - ton of value in analytics showing areas of town with lower penetration of a given product or category If I wasn’t already building something I believe in, this is what I would be doing.

the reverse is also possible, where you can be a big box retail store and find resale value stuff too!

super cool idea

thanks dude

we’re one API price cut away from every camera becoming a live search bar