Challenge
Sergey Shcherbanenko, co-founder and technical director of Sannacode, came up with an idea of Costless at the time he left the grocery store he had never visited before. He found that he spent more money than usual. It turned out that prices of the same goods can differ widely in different grocery stores even if the latter are close to one another. One has to check prices for goods and compare them manually in order not to overpay, which is quite inconvenient and time-consuming. Ultimately, Sergey aimed at creating a mobile application that would help automate this process and make lives of millions of consumers easier.
Solution
Were decided to make a mobile application that allows one to track spending on day-to-day purchases and thereby save time and money, the greatest resources in the life of a modern man. A small number of available services aimed at monitoring and comparing prices, as well as their limited functionality, strengthened Sergey's desire to create a unique product even more. The Sannacode team faced the challenge of creating an application that would include the following functions: Viewing and comparing prices with an instant result displayed on the map just after a user selected the product; Automatic recalculation of the total price of the shopping list items in case of price changes, if any; Tracking of special offers in super- and hypermarkets; Showing geographical position of super- and hypermarkets on the map. Creating shopping lists with ability comparing prices in grocery stores and the capacity to find the nearest one. Implementation In developing Costless, we relied on previous huge experience we’ve had after cooperation with large companies and start-ups. The project team consisted of 12 people, namely Web and Mobile App Developers, Business Analyst, UI/UX Designer, QA Engineers, Content Managers, Copywriter and Project Manager. We designed the product prototype and created the mobile application architecture. It took three weeks for us to make the UI and UX design. We used Sketch, Marvel, and Adobe After Effects to develop the latter. After we reached consensus on the visual design of the application, we moved on to developing a back-end where we utilized PHP7, Laravel5, Redis, and MySQL. The Android app entailed working with Android Studio, Android SDK, Retrofit 2, RxJava, Google Maps, Facebook SDK, Google+ SDK, Crashlytics. The iOS app entailed working with Realm, RxSwift, RxCococa, Alamofire, Google+ SDK, Crashlytics, Google Maps, Facebook SDK. The development of the Android app main functions the same as iOS app took three months while the development of the back-end took four months. The most time- and labor-consuming part of the project was filling the database with each item manually. We continuously develop new functions available on the Android and iOS apps, we update and maintain the project database.
Results
At the moment, Costless is available in Play Market and Apple Store for comparing prices of Ukraine supermarkets. The Sannacode team intends to increase the availability of super- and hypermarkets located in the cities of Ukraine and other countries.
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