I'm Bill and I live in Dayton, Ohio. I have a family, a normal day job, and a couple of hours most nights after everyone else goes to bed to wind down. During those couple of hours is when I built Dishcount.
The inspiration for Dishcount came from a $7.99 jar of something I needed one tablespoon of. I can't remember if it was capers or tahini. I was standing in Kroger, looking at a cart full of full-price items, realizing I'd never even checked the sales.
Dishcount is the tool that could have saved me a lot of time and money. You enter your zip code, it pulls the live weekly deals from your local stores, and it builds meals around what's actually on sale. I'm not a developer. An AI coding assistant helped me get started. A lot of stubbornness and dislike of spending more than I need to kept me going. The full story is in Why I Built Dishcount →.
What it does
You type in your zip code. Dishcount pulls live weekly deals from Kroger, ALDI, and 15 other supported chains near you. You pick the deals that look good. Tell it any dietary stuff, like "no pork" or "gluten-free." Mention what you already have at home if you want. Hit a button.
It generates meals built around those sale items. Real recipes. Quantities, instructions, and what each meal actually costs based on the live prices at your store. There's a shopping list. If you're a Kroger shopper, it can send the list straight to your cart for pickup.
Other deals-first planners hand you a fixed menu someone wrote in advance. Dishcount generates the recipes against the specific items on sale near you, so the plan changes when the ads change. There's a full feature list → if you want it.
The math behind it
The average American family spends about $270 a week on groceries (USDA, 2025) and throws away nearly 30% of what they buy (USDA Economic Research Service). Most stores run weekly sales. Most shoppers don't shop them.
For my family of five, switching from picking recipes first to checking the sales first took us from $175 to $200 a week down to about $140 to $160. That's roughly $1,800 to $3,000 a year. No coupon-clipping. No weird brand swaps. The food is actually a little better because we eat more seasonal produce now.
Dishcount supports 27 grocery chains — 16 sourced from weekly ads plus all 11 Kroger-family banners — with a few hundred deals live in each market at any given time. The list refreshes when the stores update their ads, usually Wednesdays. The deals are real. The prices are whatever your local store charges that week. The savings number you see on each recipe is worked out from the sale price the store advertised that week.
Common questions
Is Dishcount really free?
Yes, free. I started writing a "premium" tier when I first launched and it felt weird, so I scrapped it. There's no paywall, no trial period, no usage limit you'll hit and have to pay to bypass. The recipes you generate today work the same way the ones you generate next month will.
Where do the deals come from?
Kroger-family stores deliver live promotional prices through Kroger's official API. Every other chain comes from a third-party service that republishes retailers' current weekly ads, and I check the terms before I use a source. When they do not allow it, I drop the source. Most of those I read as structured text rather than guessing at a picture. Meijer is the one exception and still comes from ad images. Sources vary by retailer and deals refresh as new ads post, usually Wednesday.
Why does it ask for my zip?
To find stores near you and pull THEIR weekly deals, not some generic average. Sale prices at Kroger in Dayton aren't the same as Kroger in Los Angeles. Your zip stays on your device and on our servers only to do that lookup. We don't sell it. We don't use it for ad tracking. It's not going anywhere.
What's the catch?
There isn't one. I'm not a venture-funded startup trying to get you hooked on a free tier before charging you. I built Dishcount in the evenings after my day job because I needed it. It's free because monetizing it felt wrong to me. Sometimes a feature breaks. Sometimes I add things slowly. That's not a catch, it's just what one-person software looks like.
Will it work for my store?
Probably, if you're in the US. Dishcount tracks all 11 Kroger-family banners (Kroger, Ralphs, Fred Meyer, King Soopers, QFC, Dillons, Mariano's, Harris Teeter, Smith's, Fry's, Pick 'n Save) and 16 chains sourced from weekly ads: ALDI, Lidl, Publix, Meijer, H-E-B, Sprouts, Safeway, Hy-Vee, ShopRite, Food Lion, Acme, Giant Eagle, Piggly Wiggly, Shaw's, Vons and Winn-Dixie. The fastest way to check is to type your zip on the homepage and see what comes back.
Do I need to make an account?
No. You can use the homepage with just a zip code and start getting recipes in under a minute. Making a free account unlocks saved recipes, family preferences (skill level, dislikes, dietary stuff), and a savings tracker. Browsing, finding deals, and generating meals all work fine without one.
A few promises
- Dishcount is free. Forever. I started writing a "premium" tier and it felt weird, so I scrapped it.
- We don't sell your data. Your zip and email aren't going anywhere.
- We don't take a cut of your grocery bill. The sale prices are whatever your store says they are.
- If something breaks, the contact form goes straight to me.
If you want to try it, the homepage is the whole thing. Type your zip and you'll see this week's deals near you in about a minute. No signup required.
— Bill McCormick