"Which supermarket is cheapest?" is the wrong question. The honest answer changes every single week, and it changes per item. This week's cheapest chicken might be at Woolworths while the cheapest cheese is at Coles and Aldi quietly wins on fruit and veg. Here's how BudgetPlate handles that, step by step.

Wednesday, 6am: the catalogues drop

Woolworths and Coles publish their new specials every Wednesday, and that's when our week starts. We pull the full catalogues for both. Aldi is trickier — it doesn't publish a neat, machine-readable price list, so we capture its weekly specials page directly (more on why Aldi is a special case in another post).

The AI reads the prices — all of them

Our AI then reads every marked price across the three stores: the half-price flags, the per-kilo meat prices, the "was/now" pairs. The output isn't a vibe about which store "feels cheaper" — it's a concrete list of what's genuinely discounted this week, item by item, store by store.

Then we adjust for your state. A NSW catalogue price isn't always the WA price, and if you're in the Northern Territory or Tasmania — where Aldi has little or no presence — we plan around the two stores you can actually walk into.

Recipes come from the specials, not a cookbook

This ordering matters. We don't start with 42 recipes and then price them; we start with the week's cheap ingredients and build recipes around them. If beef mince is $9 a kilo this week, you'll see rissoles, bolognese and a cottage pie. When it isn't, you won't. That's why the menu is different every Wednesday.

Your list, split by store

When you tick the dinners you want, BudgetPlate builds one shopping list and assigns each ingredient to the store where it's cheapest this week, grouped with per-store subtotals — a Woolies section, a Coles section, an Aldi section.

Two honest caveats:

  • You don't have to visit three stores. The per-store split typically saves a further 5–15% on top of the specials themselves, but if that's not worth the driving to you, shop the whole list at your nearest store — the recipes are still built around whatever's discounted, which is where most of the saving comes from.
  • Everyday staples are close everywhere. Milk, flour, sugar — the big two match each other within cents, and Aldi is usually slightly under. The real money is in proteins and branded goods, where weekly specials swing prices by 30–50%.

Then it keeps score

Every list you build logs the difference between the special prices you paid and the full prices you didn't. That running total lives in your profile — some of our earliest users are past a few hundred dollars, which buys a lot of school shoes.

If you want to see what this week's split looks like for your family, BudgetPlate is free on Google Play — 7 recipes a week on the free plan, all 42 on Pro.