Two ways, and they answer different questions. Which store wins this item? Open any product and you'll see every one of your stores listed with its current price — the cheapest one flagged, sale prices marked with the regular price crossed out, and an honest "not carried" where a store doesn't stock it at all. Which store wins the whole trip? That's the one that actually saves money. Grocery List Plus prices your entire list at each of your stores and tells you which comes out ahead — and it factors in the cost of the trip itself, so it won't send you to a second store across town to save a dollar on cereal. Full-basket comparison comes with a subscription. When you search for something or add it to your list, we ask your stores what it costs right now, rather than showing you a number we cached last month and hoped was still true.

Today, live pricing comes from the Kroger family of stores — Kroger itself, plus Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, Ralphs, QFC, Mariano's, Dillons, Food 4 Less and Foods Co — through Kroger's own developer API. We want that list to be a lot longer, and we're working on it constantly. Here's the honest part: whether a chain shows up here isn't entirely up to us. Some grocers publish their prices through a developer program anyone can build on. Others keep that data closed, or license it on terms that would only work if we marked up what you pay — and we won't do that. So we ask, we keep asking, and we add a chain the day they're willing to share accurate, current pricing. If your store isn't on the list, telling them you'd like it to be genuinely helps. What we won't do is scrape prices off a website or estimate them. A wrong price is worse than no price. And it isn't only the big chains. Any store can sell with us directly — a neighborhood grocer, a butcher, a farm stand, a halal market, a specialty shop. If that's you, there's an application on our vendors page and we'd love to hear from you.

Fresher than anyone else will give you, and how fresh is up to you. On Gold and Platinum, prices are real-time — when you look at an item, we ask the store right then. Silver refreshes every six hours. Ad-Free twice a day, and on the Free plan, once a day. That's not an arbitrary ladder. Knowing what something costs right now is the hardest and most expensive part of what we do — every live price is a call to the store's system — so it's the thing your subscription actually buys. Everything else in the app works the same on every plan.

Yes. Add the stores you actually shop to Your Stores, and pick one as your primary — that's the one we lead with and price your list against by default. The rest sort by how close they are to you. These are also the stores we go and ask when you search, which is why picking the two or three you really use beats adding every store in town.

Yes. When something's on sale at one of your stores, we show the sale price with the regular price crossed out beside it — so you can see what you're saving and where, and the comparison reflects what you'd actually pay at the register.