# Supplier price alerts for restaurants

Supplier price alerts for restaurants is a SaaS idea for owners and chefs of independent restaurants and cafés, priced to test at $39 a month per location. Suppliers raise prices a little at a time, and nobody notices until the margin is gone. With it, owners photograph supplier invoices, and the app tracks each ingredient’s price and flags every rise.

_Published 19 Oct 2026. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build._

## What problem does it solve?

Suppliers raise prices a little at a time, and nobody notices until the margin is gone. Comparing invoices by hand is a job no one has time for.

**Why now:** AI models can now read photos of messy invoices well enough to pull out the lines and prices for a person to check.

## What do they use today?

Owners file supplier invoices in a drawer or a folder and look at them when the books are done. Price checks depend on a chef remembering that an item cost less last time.

## How does it work?

When a delivery arrives, the owner photographs the supplier’s invoice, or uploads the file, and the app pulls out each line and its price. The owner checks the lines against the paper and fixes any that were misread, and each ingredient builds a price history by supplier. An alert goes out when a price rises past the limit the owner set, and a monthly summary arrives by email.

## What goes in the first version?

- Upload supplier invoices as photos or PDFs
- Lines and prices pulled out, then checked by the owner
- Price history per ingredient and supplier
- An alert when a price rises past a set percentage
- A monthly summary email

## Who pays, and how much?

- **Who pays:** Owners and chefs of independent restaurants and cafés
- **Price to test:** $39 a month per location

The price is per location, since each kitchen has its own suppliers, deliveries and invoices. An owner with more kitchens pays for each one, and the tool replaces a drawer of paper invoices.

## How to test it in 7 days

1. Ask in r/restaurantowners how owners notice supplier price rises.
2. Get five real invoices from a friendly café and pull the prices out by hand.
3. Show the result to three owners and ask for a pre-order.

## Where to find the first customers

- r/restaurantowners and r/KitchenConfidential
- Accountants who work with restaurants
- Local restaurant associations

## What are the risks?

- A misread price breaks trust, so every line needs a quick human check.
- Inventory suites sometimes track prices too.

## How to build it on shipanysaas

5 of the parts it needs are already in the kit, the phone app with the All-in plan. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.

**Already in the kit:** Teams and roles, Billing, Emails, In-app notifications, Phone app with All-in

**You build:**

- Invoice upload and AI extraction
- Owner review of extracted lines
- Price history and alerts

[Get the kit](https://www.shipanysaas.com/pricing)

### The starting prompt

```text
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase; with the All-in plan, the Expo phone app is in apps/native. Help me build the first version of Supplier price alerts for restaurants.

Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it.

## The product
- What it does: Owners photograph supplier invoices, and the app tracks each ingredient’s price and flags every rise.
- Who pays: Owners and chefs of independent restaurants and cafés
- Their problem: Suppliers raise prices a little at a time, and nobody notices until the margin is gone. Comparing invoices by hand is a job no one has time for.
- Price to test: $39 a month per location (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts)

## Build only this first version
1. Upload supplier invoices as photos or PDFs
2. Lines and prices pulled out, then checked by the owner
3. Price history per ingredient and supplier
4. An alert when a price rises past a set percentage
5. A monthly summary email

## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it
- Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations
- Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments
- Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer
- In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app
- Phone app: an iPhone, iPad and Android app on the same backend (All-in plan)

## New code it needs
- Invoice upload and AI extraction
- Owner review of extracted lines
- Price history and alerts

## How to work
1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK.
2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files.
3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next.

## Rules
- Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel.
- Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are.
- If apps/native is not in your copy (the Starter plan), build the web app only.

Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
```

### Guides for the parts it uses

- [Expo Supabase setup: one backend for your web and phone apps](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/expo-supabase-one-backend)
- [Multi-tenant SaaS architecture: teams, roles and invitations done right](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/multi-tenant-saas-teams-roles-invitations)
- [How to add in-app notifications to a Next.js + Supabase app](https://www.shipanysaas.com/blog/nextjs-supabase-in-app-notifications)

## More ideas: Back office

- [Shift swaps for small hourly teams](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/hourly-shift-swaps): Staff post shifts they can’t work, colleagues pick them up, and the manager approves with one tap.
- [Licence and insurance expiry tracker for contractors](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/contractor-certificate-tracker): Contractors keep every licence, insurance certificate and training record for their crew and subcontractors, with reminders before anything lapses.
- [Step-by-step procedures with read receipts](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas/procedures-with-read-receipts): Small teams write procedures with photos once, staff confirm they’ve read them, and the owner sees who still needs training.

- [All SaaS ideas](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas)
- [Try the free generator](https://www.shipanysaas.com/saas-ideas#generator)