BesqWare Shopping Buddy app for iPhone and iPad

One afternoon my wife asked if I wanted to go look for a new refrigerator since our current one was giving us troubles. I said sure. Soon we were in a home furnishing store. I did not see any refrigerators. My wife explained that if we were going to pull out the refrigerator we might as well redo the countertops as well. And maybe the tile. I began to worry. As we went through the store my wife asked me to keep track of the countertops we were seeing and the tiles, including what they cost per square foot. “How?” I asked. “With your phone thingy”, she replied. I dutifully searched the app store for something that would work, but the only shopping apps had to do with barcodes and groceries. Nothing that would store the information we needed. I explained this to her, at which point I was asked to “just take lots of pictures, we’ll figure it out at home. I want to see what it looks like next to the wall anyhow.” And so the idea of Shopping Buddy was formed.

With Shopping Buddy you can take pictures of items you are shopping for and enter in the cost of the item as well as where you found it. You can enter costs based on per-foot, per-yard or per-case prices (including the ability to set the number of items in a case). And if you are out shopping by yourself you can also email items to a friend to find out if they agree that the tile for $45 per square foot is just perfect with the new countertops. (For the record, the tile at $2.09 per square foot is just as nice).