15 Years of Web Scraping — I Finally Built Something for Myself
I've been scraping the web professionally since 2010. All that time I was building tools for clients — tracking competitor prices, monitoring inventory, building datasets. I never had a product of my own. Until I got tired of fake discounts.
How it started
For 15 years I've written hundreds of scraping scripts for retailers, aggregators, and analytics companies. I know how pricing works from the inside.
And every time I bought something online, I'd catch myself thinking: "Is this discount even real?"
Original price: $79.99
40% OFF! → $47.99
Three months ago this item cost $46.00. There's no real discount here.
This isn't a rare occurrence — it's standard practice. Retailers inflate the price before a sale, then "cut" it back down. It looks like a deal. It isn't.
Why this is especially annoying when you know how it works
When you understand web scraping, you look at fake discounts differently. You know: the data exists, the price history is there, it's all sitting on the retailer's servers. They just don't show it to shoppers.
I started collecting prices for myself. Just a script that ran once a day against my carts on a few stores and logged everything to a spreadsheet. It worked, but it was clunky — I had to run it manually and check the file separately.
Then it hit me: what if this were a browser extension? Price history appearing right inside the cart, with zero extra effort.
What I built
That's how TonyCartoni was born — a Chrome extension that automatically tracks price changes on items in your shopping carts.
- You open your cart on any supported store, as usual.
- The extension records the current prices.
- Next time you visit — it shows you what changed: up, down, or unchanged.
- You see real price movement, not marketing "–40%".
No setup required. Just use your stores as usual — visit the cart once a day or whenever it's convenient.
Where it works
The extension currently supports a growing list of stores:
The list keeps growing. If your store isn't there — let me know and I'll add it quickly.
About your data
All your cart and price data is stored locally in your browser only. I have no access to what's in your cart. Nothing is sent to any server.
Why I built this
Honestly — I needed it myself. I was tired of manually checking prices and getting annoyed at "discounts" that weren't discounts.
For fifteen years I built pricing tools for businesses so they could track their competitors. Now I built one for myself — and for regular shoppers — so we can see the real price history too.
The extension is free. It earned a Featured badge on the Chrome Web Store. I hope it's useful.
Install the extension — and next time you open your cart, you'll know whether that discount is real or not.
Install TonyCartoni Free · Chrome Web Store