The smallest job on this list, and the one I most often turn down.
Two people who buy a lot and lose track of it. One who researches every purchase for weeks and still feels cheated. One small reseller who buys to resell and needs to know real prices. This is the smallest-value group in the list and I include it honestly, because it is also where I most often say the answer is not much.
Comparison paralysis, mostly. Eleven browser tabs, four review sites that are all affiliate-funded, a price that was different yesterday, and a nagging suspicion that the sale is not one. Plus the slow leak: subscriptions nobody cancelled, returns nobody sent back within the window, warranties nobody registered.
- Tracking a product’s price over time across sellers and flagging a real drop
- Detecting the fake discount — the price that rose for two weeks before the sale
- Filtering reviews for the ones that mention durability, sizing or failure
- Tracking the return window and reminding before it closes
- Auditing recurring charges against the bank statement
- Warranty and receipt storage, searchable
- Building the comparison table on the attributes you actually care about
- Whether to buy it
- Whether it is worth the money to you
- Taste
- The price watcher
- Named products tracked over time with a real history — so the "40% off" claim can be checked against what it cost in March. Alerts on genuine lows only.
- The review filter
- Pulls reviews, discards the obviously incentivised, and surfaces the ones that mention what breaks and when. Longevity is what people actually want to know and it is buried under five-star reviews written on day two.
- The return and warranty diary
- Every purchase gets a return-window date and a receipt file. Boring, and quietly the thing that saves the most money.
- The subscription audit
- Once, at the start: every recurring charge listed with its date and amount. In all four cases this found something they had forgotten. It is a spreadsheet and an afternoon.
- The comparison table
- For a specific decision, on your criteria, with the sources kept.
It does not buy anything, and it does not recommend.
No stored card, no auto-purchase, no "best pick". Partly because the consequence of a wrong autonomous purchase is real money, and partly because a recommendation engine built by me for one person is a worse version of what you can do in ten minutes with the filtered data in front of you.
It also does not compile a profile. No cross-site tracking of your own behaviour, no "you also might want". Enough of that exists already.
Money recovered from cancelled subscriptions and returns actually made in window — in all four cases this exceeded my fee within a month. Hours per purchase decision. Whether you still feel cheated, which is the real complaint underneath.
Often, and this is the group where I say it most. Three people have asked me for a shopping AI and I told two of them they would save more by writing down what they intend to buy that month. The compulsive-research pattern is not a tooling problem — more information makes it worse, because the research is doing an emotional job.
An afternoon, once. There is no ongoing effort, and that is deliberate.
He talked me out of most of what I asked for, which is not what I expected from someone selling a service. The subscription audit was one hour and found three things I had been paying for since 2022. The return-window diary is boring and has saved me more than anything clever would have. He told me plainly that a shopping AI would make my research habit worse rather than better, and he was right about that too.
I buy to resell so I need to know what things actually cost over time, not what a banner says today. The price history let me check a “forty per cent off” claim against what it cost in March, and it was not forty per cent off. The review filter surfaces the people who mention what broke and when, which is the only thing I care about. One afternoon of setup, no ongoing work, which he was quite insistent about.
Tell me what your week looks like.
I'll tell you honestly which parts you can hand over — and which you can't.