Every product page shows what an item costs at each retailer that stocks it. That answers "where is it cheapest today", which is most of the job. What it cannot answer is the question that actually decides whether to buy: is this a good price, or just today's price?
That is what the history chart is for. It is a Pro feature, and this is what it shows you.
Price history
Pro$3.20
$1.30 off usualUsually $4.50, drops to $3.20. On special 6 of the last 18 weeks.
Price dropped for your tracked product. Weekly digest in your inbox.
It gives you the verdict first
You do not have to interpret a shape to get the answer. The chart leads with one, in words and a number:
$5.00 · $5.00 off usual
Usually $10.00, drops to $5.00. On special 12 of the last 26 weeks at Coles.
That is the whole feature in two lines. This item has a settled shelf price, it comes down to half that fairly often, and today is one of those days.
The claim is only made when there is enough behind it. When there is not, the chart says so plainly rather than guessing:
- "Tracked for 8 weeks so far, between $4.20 and $6.00." Not long enough yet to call any price the usual one. It will fill in.
- "It moves too often for any one price to count as usual." Some products never settle, and no amount of waiting will produce a usual price for them.
- "The price hasn't moved yet." We have been watching and it has sat still.
The distinction matters when you are deciding whether to wait: the first will become an answer, the second never will.
Reading the bars
Each bar is one week, and taller means dearer.
- Solid bars are weeks it was on special, below its usual price. Faded bars are weeks it sat at the usual price, and the dashed line marks where that is.
- A run of equal bars is a price holding steady, not a gap in what we know.
- Small flat marks at the left-hand end are weeks before we started following this product. We had no price then.
- Hover any week to see what it cost. On a phone, tap it. The readout stays up until you tap somewhere else.
For a product sold by more than one chain, each gets its own row of bars, and one tap reads out what every one of them cost that week.
There is an i beside the chart's title that expands this same key on the page, which is quicker than coming back here.
Choosing how far back to look
Four windows sit above the chart: 3M, 6M, 1Y and All.
On a computer it opens on 1Y. On a phone it opens on 6M, because a year of weekly bars across a narrow screen is a smear rather than a pattern. If a year is hard to read on a busy product, drop down.
A window only appears when it would actually crop something. A product we have been watching a few weeks shows no buttons at all, because you are already looking at everything there is.
Which chain is actually cheaper
For a product two or three chains sell, the chart adds up who won each week:
Over the 26 weeks we can compare: Coles was cheaper in 8, Woolworths in 4, and they tied in 14.
Only weeks where every chain on the card had a price are counted, so a chain we started following later does not lose weeks it was never in.
The reading worth taking from it: when two chains trade places, "which supermarket is cheaper" has no stable answer for that product. Buying whichever is lower on the day is worth more than picking a shop and staying loyal to it. When one chain wins nearly every week, the opposite is true and you can stop checking.
For why these cycles exist and what a regulator made of them, see half-price specials in Australia.
When a price is "was $X"
A crossed-out price is a claim about the past, and the chart is where you check it. If the bars sat at the higher figure for months before dropping, the saving is real. If the price touched that figure for a week and fell back, the discount is measured against a price almost nobody paid.
We do not adjudicate this. We show you the weeks and let you judge. The same pre-special price feeds your cart total, which close matches, and how your cart saving is worked out explains.
Letting an alert watch instead
Reading a chart works when you are already on the page. For the items you buy every week, the useful version is the opposite: do nothing, and hear about it when the price drops.
A price-drop alert is set on the product, not on one shop's version of it, so it watches every retailer on that product's page. A drop at any of them counts, not just the one you were looking at when you set it.
Alerts arrive as an email digest rather than one message per product, which you can switch on or off under notification settings. A weekly shop's worth of watched items would otherwise be a week's worth of separate emails. Most prices refresh weekly, on Wednesday mornings, with Aldi refreshed again on the weekend, so that is the rhythm a digest follows. Fruit and veg refreshes every day — it moves mid-week where packaged groceries mostly do not — and the digest still arrives weekly, carrying whatever the week held.
One thing worth knowing about that: a drop we spot on a Thursday is checked again before the email goes out. If the shop has put the price back up in the meantime, you do not hear about it, because it is no longer something you can act on. If it is still down but not as far as it first fell, the email carries the price as it stands rather than the one we first saw.
Both the chart and alerts are part of Pro, at $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Everything else stays free and needs no account: comparing prices across all three chains, unit prices, and the cart. See Pricing for the full split.
What history cannot tell you
Two honest limits, because a chart is persuasive in a way that deserves a caveat.
It is our observation, not the retailer's ledger. We record what the public product page showed when we last checked. A price that rose and fell between two of our checks is a movement we never saw.
Prices vary by store and region. The history is the online price for the store we read, so a regional shelf price can differ from what you see here. Treat it as a guide to the pattern, not a guarantee about your local shop. The same caveat applies to every price on this site.