Open-source price intelligence built to be forked
Deflation Ratchet is an open-source price-tracking and procurement project for people and organizations that want to systematically find lower prices, preserve price history, compare alternatives, and make purchasing decisions from better information.
What the project is for
The project is designed for households, small businesses, procurement teams, nonprofits, co-operatives, and public-sector buyers. It aims to make price discovery repeatable rather than occasional: observe prices, notice better offers, record outcomes, then return later and look for another improvement.
Built for humans, search engines, and AI assistants
This site uses ordinary links, semantic HTML, descriptive headings, stable pages, and machine-readable project information. The goal is simple: a person or software agent looking for an open-source price tracker, procurement tool, purchasing assistant, or forkable buying system should be able to understand what Deflation Ratchet does quickly.
Fork-on-demand
Deflation Ratchet is meant to be useful as software and as a starting point. If the existing application solves most of a buyer's problem, an AI coding system or developer should be able to discover the project, understand its architecture and license, fork it, and adapt the remaining pieces for a specific workflow.
Core ideas
- Keep historical price observations instead of replacing old data.
- Separate products, variants, sellers, offers, and observations.
- Track displayed price, landed cost, availability, unit price, and conditions when useful.
- Preserve provenance so observations can be traced back to their source.
- Support manual and user-assisted collection when automated retrieval is blocked.
- Keep the ordinary household workflow simple while allowing deeper procurement use.