Support

There is a free version and a paid one, and the free one is not a trial — it does not run out.

• Free. Unlimited comparisons in On the Phone mode: your iPhone reads the shelf tags, you confirm each price and size with a tap, and nothing leaves your device. No purchase, no account, works offline.
• Better Value Premium. Full Read mode — photograph both products and it reads the tags for you — plus the nearby-stores lookup. Free for 3 days, then $1.99/month or $14.99/year. It renews automatically until you cancel, which you can do any time in your iPhone's Settings → your name → Subscriptions.

Photograph two or more products you're comparing (up to five at once), then tap Compare. Either way it converts them all to the same unit and tells you which is the better value per unit — what differs is who reads the shelf tag.

In On the Phone mode (free), your iPhone reads each shelf tag itself and you confirm the price and size it found with a tap — nothing is typed blind, and nothing leaves your device. In Full Read mode (Premium), our AI reads the tags from your photos instead, which handles messier or more crowded shelves with less confirming from you.

Two reasons, and both are good ones. On the Phone is free and unlimited, and it never sends anything off your phone. Confirming what your iPhone read is also the more certain of the two: shelves are crowded with numbers, and a quick tap on each price and size tells the app exactly which number belongs to which product.

Full Read is for when a shelf is especially crowded or your hands are full — its AI often needs less correcting on messy labels. Either mode: when it isn't confident about a number, it says so rather than inventing one.

• Weight — normalized to grams (g).
• Volume — normalized to millilitres (mL); US fluid ounces are converted at 29.5735 mL.
• Count — "each" (for example, a 12-pack).

You can compare a 750 mL bottle against a 1.2 L bottle, or a 500 g bag against a 1 kg bag — the app does the conversion for you.

• Basically identical — the two unit prices are less than 0.5% apart, so it doesn't really matter which you choose.
• Slightly better value — a real but small gap of 0.5%–2%.
• Better value — a clear gap of more than 2%, shown with how much you save per unit.

The wording is always relative ("Better Value" / "Worse Value"), and every figure reconciles to the two unit prices the app shows you.

Better Value never guesses. If a label is blurry, partly hidden, or the app isn't confident it read a number correctly, it asks you to verify rather than risk a wrong answer. If a price or size is missing entirely, it'll tell you it doesn't have enough to compare. Try tapping again with the label well-lit and in focus.

Yes, for straightforward multi-buy tags like "2 for $5.00" or "3/$10" — the app works out the per-unit price and asks you to confirm it before using it. Buy-X-get-Y deals, member/loyalty pricing, and "buy 4, pay $3 each" conditional pricing aren't supported yet — for those it'll ask you to tap in the regular shelf price instead.

The current version is tuned for Canadian dollars, English labels, and a period as the decimal separator. Anything else — a comma decimal or a non-English label — is flagged for you to verify rather than guessed. Wider locale support is planned.

There is no account and nothing about you is tracked, either way. Beyond that it depends which mode you pick, and you pick it before taking any photo:

• On the Phone (free) — works with no internet connection at all, and no photo, text or location ever leaves your device.
• Full Read (Premium) — needs a connection, because your photos are sent to be read. They are not stored by us, and our AI provider works under a zero-retention agreement, so they are discarded once the answer comes back.

See our Privacy Policy for the full detail, including the rounded-off location used by the nearby-stores lookup.

Better Value runs on iPhone with iOS 16 or later. It's an iPhone app and is not designed for iPad.

Please email us at info@halifaxinnovationstudio.ca with what you tapped and what you expected. Real-world examples genuinely help us improve the app.