PriceStory started with a ₹12,000 mistake.
During Amazon's Great Indian Festival a couple of years ago, we bought a pair of wireless headphones that were advertised at "45% off — lowest price of the year." It felt like a great deal. The timer was ticking, the discount badge was bright orange, and the price seemed genuinely low compared to the crossed-out MRP.
Two weeks later, while searching for the same headphones as a gift, we found them listed at ₹2,000 less than we'd paid — with no sale, no badge, no timer. Just the regular price.
We'd been sold urgency. Not a deal.
The Question That Wouldn't Go Away
After that, we started checking prices more carefully. We looked up products we'd bought during sales and compared what we'd paid to what the price was a month later, or a month before.
The results were uncomfortable. More often than not, when we checked, the "sale" price was the same as or higher than what the product had cost a few weeks before the sale.
We weren't uniquely unlucky. We'd found a pattern — one that's well-documented for anyone who looks, but invisible to shoppers relying on Amazon's own price display, which only shows you the current price.
What the Market Was Missing
At the time, there were price tracking tools for the US, UK, and European markets. CamelCamelCamel for Amazon US has been around since 2008. European shoppers have several options.
For India — specifically Amazon.in — there was almost nothing. No reliable price story tracker, no comparison tool that actually showed meaningful historical data for Indian listings.
Indian e-commerce was growing massively. Millions of people were shopping online, many for the first time. And the tools to shop smartly — to verify whether a deal was real — simply didn't exist for the Indian market.
What PriceStory Does
PriceStory is a price story tracker for Amazon India. Paste any Amazon.in product URL and you'll see a chart of how the price has moved over the past 12 months.
That's the core feature. It's simple on purpose — because the insight you need is also simple: is today's price actually lower than it usually is?
From there, we've built out cross-store comparison (Amazon vs Flipkart), a deals page that surfaces products currently at or near their historical lows, and category browsing for mobiles, laptops, and TVs.
What PriceStory Doesn't Do
We're not trying to predict prices. We're not a shopping engine that recommends products. We don't send you daily deal emails.
We provide historical data and let you make the decision. We believe that's the right model — informed buyers making their own calls, not a platform optimising your purchases for maximum affiliate commission.
(We do earn affiliate commissions when you click through to Amazon — that's how the site stays free. But we only surface a product as a "deal" when the price story supports it, not based on which products have higher commission rates.)
The Honest Part About Where We Are
PriceStory is a young product. We have a Vercel demo running with mock data, and we're building out the real data infrastructure. We're a small team, building in public, iterating based on what users actually need.
We're not a VC-backed startup with a roadmap to 50 features. We're a focused tool doing one thing well: showing you whether a deal is real before you spend your money.
If you find it useful, share it with someone who shops online. That's genuinely the best way to help us grow.
Disclaimer: Portions of this article were generated with AI assistance. The origin story described reflects the authentic motivation behind building PriceStory. PriceStory is an independent price tracking tool with no affiliation to Amazon, Flipkart, or any store whose prices we track.