We don't do price comparisons. What Grocery List Plus gives you is an estimate of what your list costs right now at each of your Preferred Stores, built from the prices those stores publish. That estimate is there for two decisions. The first is where your list is actually in stock. Every store shows how many of your items it carries today, like “17 of 23 in stock”, plus anything on sale and what that saves you. A store that has everything on your list can be worth more to you than one that is a few dollars cheaper and missing four things. Open any item and you can see what each of your stores charges for it. The second is telling us where to shop. When you place an online order, you pick the store, and your Grocery List Plus Runner shops that store for you. These are estimates, not quotes. Prices move during the day, promotions are local, and a shelf tag can differ from the price a store publishes. Treat the total as a close guide rather than a guaranteed receipt.

Today, live chain 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 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. It isn't only the big chains. Any store can sell with Grocery List Plus directly — a neighborhood grocer, a butcher, a bakery, a farm stand, a halal or Latin market, a specialty shop. Instead of an API, they get a vendor account: they list what they carry, set their own prices and sale dates, and keep them current as things change. That puts a small store's real prices right next to the chains on your list, with no aggregator in between and no markup on what you pay. Applications are open on our vendors page. What we won't do is scrape prices off a website or estimate them. Scraped prices go stale, they break the moment a site changes, and they're taken without permission. A wrong price is worse than no price — so when we can't get a price honestly and keep it current, we show you nothing at that store rather than a guess.

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 price you see reflects what you'd actually pay at the register.