Amazon Price Tracker

November and December are the months of Diwali, Christmas, cold weather, hot chocolates, delicious thanksgiving dinners, desserts, family time, and of course black Friday - cyber Monday shopping deals! With more and more retailers shifting their business online, it's become hard for customers like us to keep track of everything in one place. And quite literally, every Software Engineer dreams of building a cool deal finder app or at least automating things by scraping websites.

So, just like any other side project enthusiast Developer, I built something during this holiday season that is making my life a little easier. The idea is simple. A webapp that accepts only your email, Amazon product URL and adds that product to your subscription list. You can add as many products as you want. Once you do this, every day you will receive an email listing all the subscribed products and their current prices on Amazon. So no need for bookmarking URLs, manually checking prices every day! By the way, I am an indie developer and not a big tech company, so I don't have any interest in asking for personal details. And of course, no email spam, unsubscribe at any point in time!

Tech behind this is extremely simple. There are two services - a Webapp written in node/express/handlebars that takes care of subscriptions. Then there's a batch service written in Java that scrapes and sends emails every day. I use hosted Cassandra service called Datastax AstraDB and as always, Heroku-GitHub takes care of my deployment pains. I leveraged the power of a bunch of pre-existing libraries, APIs, tools, frameworks on the go.

The important thing to note is, this is just the MVP! The scope of the project is beyond Amazon and sending emails every day. There are so many cool things that can be built on top, for eg. support for other popular retailers, notification time settings, etc.

Let me know what you think!