Case Study - CamelCamelCamel for everything
Costbot is a personal product I built in 2022 to track prices across dozens of marketplaces and alert shoppers before a deal disappears.
- Client
- Costbot
- Year
- Service
- Niche Product Development
Why Costbot
I wanted “CamelCamelCamel for anything,” not just Amazon. Costbot watches prices across marketplaces like Target, Best Buy, REI, Etsy, and a rotating cast of DTC brands. The project scratches my product-development itch and showcases how I approach experimentation.
How it works
- Workers + queues – Product URLs flow through an orchestrated queue (Bull + Redis) where workers fetch data via APIs, headless Chromium, or HTML diffing.
- Normalization – All results normalize into a canonical schema so alerts, charts, and exports can treat every merchant identically.
- Alerting – Users subscribe via webhook or email; alerts fire when price deltas cross thresholds or inventory drops below safe levels.
Lessons
Costbot gives me a real-world playground for performance tuning, scraping ethics, and shipping polished UX as a solo builder—skills that translate directly to the products I build for clients.