WhatToBuy
Describe your situation, get AI-curated shopping carts
Details
- External ID
- 47561773
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- March 29, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.491389913899139
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Before reading text please try the app https://www.whattobuy.app (to get great UX feedback)Shopping research is one of the most challenging tasks and people spend 30-60 min before buying an item. We developed a platform called “WhatToBuy” to save people time. In some cases shoppers are not super aware of what to really order for a trip or occasion. Our app helps them to get a range of products needed for each use-cases hence saving time and money.App workflow: Describe your situation in plain English. In Fast mode, you get three ready-to-shop carts: Budget, Balanced, and Premium with real products, real prices, and direct buy links. In Deep mode, AI assistant has a conversation with you first and builds a single cart tailored specifically to your answers.How it works: * You type something like "camping weekend with two young kids" or "setting up a home office on a tight budget" * AI assistant (powered by Claude) parses the scenario and generates a list of specific product search queries. For example, in the above query for camping, product search will be "tent 4-person easy setup" instead of simply "tent". * Those queries hit Shopping API and return real-time results. * A scoring layer ranks by price, rating, and review count to pick one winner per product category per tier.Two modes: * Deep (default): AI assistant asks a few follow up questions before building a single personalized cart. We default to this because more context means dramatically better picks. Sign in is required for this mode, but you can always drop back to Fast mode with one click. * Fast: Instant three-tier carts, no sign in needed, works right away.Please take a look: https://www.whattobuy.app No account needed to try the fast mode. Would love feedback on where the recommendations miss or where the UX feels off.
Enrichment
- Theme
- virtual try-on and ai fashion styling
- Vertical
- Retail & commerce
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- ai-curated shopping recommendations
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a consumer-facing AI wrapper that takes user lifestyle requirements and uses an LLM with web search or product catalog APIs to output curated shopping recommendations.
Discussion
18 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Pinterest, Google, Amazon
Concerns raised: Doesn't filter out unavailable and obsolete products, Fast mode doesn't use location data unless signed in, Fails to understand specific technical requirements (e.g., high-zoom compact camera), Lacks interpretability for why products are recommended
Feature requests: Add location-based filtering for nearby item availability, Show reasoning/explanation for why products are recommended, Support niche/adult content queries (improve content policy handling), Improve fast mode to match deep mode quality without login requirement
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 88 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #47 of 89 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 135 days after the earliest competitor.
- AI Store Shopper · ph · 2026-09-06 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- I built a free app for New Yorkers to save money on groceries · hn · 2026-07-10 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- ShopPilot · ph · 2026-09-14 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Hand-E AI Discounts · ph · 2026-09-29 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- CartAI · ph · 2026-07-21 · 404 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Infinite canvas product search and decision making · hn · 2025-11-14 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Mezahe BeClick · ph · 2026-09-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- Spendwise · ph · 2026-09-16 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.