Priceonomics wants to be the service to tell you how much anything you want to buy will cost you. Following in the footsteps of FindTheBest, Priceonomics searches for prices on consumer goods so you can compare sellers and find the best deal.
“We’ve built a search engine for prices, crawling through transitions to find what people are selling and how much they are selling it for,” said co-founder Michael Flaxman onstage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day.
Flaxman points out that price guides used to be exclusively for cars, because they were too expensive to print out for any other products. Now the Internet has been most people’s go-to place to find the price on the new iPad or an Android phone. It’s easy to Google the price of something or scan a barcode in a store, which is how most people look up a price. Priceonomics wants to be the best site to find prices and replace Google.
“Our mission: tell everyone exactly how much to pay when they buy anything,” said Flaxman.
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It sounds very ambitious to gather every price on everything, but Priceonomics’ mission has already gained some backing: Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and CrunchFund have all invested. It will likely compete with FindTheBest, which gives comprehensive pricing information with reviews and product details.
Priceonomics is one of 39 companies presenting at Y Combinator’s Demo Day Spring 2012 event. Check out other cool companies making their debut here.
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