Bagged and A spreadsheet
The honest baseline. It works, right up until the week you are busy.
The real alternative to most apps is not another app. It is a spreadsheet, and anyone who has kept one going for a year has a genuinely better dataset than most products would give them.
It deserves a straight comparison rather than a straw man, because on several dimensions it wins outright.
The short answer
A maintained spreadsheet is better on privacy, cost and flexibility, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Bagged is for the far more common case where the spreadsheet was started twice and abandoned twice.
Side by side
| Feature | A spreadsheet | Bagged |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free. | A product, with a price attached. |
| Effort per shop | Typing every line by hand. 16 rows on the example receipt. | One photograph. |
| Privacy | Total. Nothing leaves your computer. | Hosted. The receipt is uploaded to be read, and never sold or shared. |
| Classification | You decide, item by item. | Inferred from the product name, with a confidence figure per line. |
| Consistency over a year | Depends on discipline. | Same method every week, because nobody is typing. |
| Failure mode | The record stops. | A photograph is missed, and the next one still parses. |
What A spreadsheet does well
- It is free, and there is no account, no subscription and no company involved.
- The data never leaves your machine, which no hosted product can match.
- It does exactly what you decide it should, with columns nobody else chose.
- It never changes its mind, gets acquired, or removes a feature you relied on.
What it does not cover
- Typing a full shop takes real time, every week, forever.
- The classification has to come from somewhere, and doing it by hand is the slow part rather than the typing.
- Consistency degrades: the same product gets entered three different ways over a year.
- It stops the first busy week, and a gap in a time series is worse than a lower-effort record.
The cost is not the typing
Entering a shop by hand is tedious but survivable. The part that actually ends the exercise is the judgement: deciding, line by line, which category a product belongs in, and remembering what you decided last time about the same product.
That is where consistency goes. A classification applied by a person on a Tuesday evening in March is not reliably the same as the one applied in October, and once it drifts the year-on-year comparison is worth less than it looks.
What a spreadsheet is genuinely better at
Privacy, above all. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is retained by anyone else, and there is no policy to read. If that is the priority then the spreadsheet is the correct answer and this page is not going to argue otherwise. What Bagged does with a receipt is set out on the privacy page.
Flexibility is the other. A spreadsheet can hold whatever columns you want, including ones no product would think to offer.
Where the trade lands
Bagged is a bet that a slightly coarser record which actually survives twelve months beats a perfect record that stops in week five. If your spreadsheet has survived a year, you have already won this argument and should keep it.
Common questions
- Is a spreadsheet more accurate than Bagged?
- It can be, if you classify every item yourself and stay consistent. The practical risk is drift over months, and the more common outcome is that the spreadsheet stops. Bagged applies the same method every week without anyone having to remember it.
- Can I export my data from Bagged?
- You can ask for a copy of your data at any time, and for all of it to be deleted. Both are set out on the privacy page.
- Is a spreadsheet more private?
- Yes, unambiguously. Nothing is uploaded and nobody else holds it. Bagged uploads the receipt photograph so it can be read, keeps it for a limited period and never sells or shares it, but that is still more exposure than a local file.
- How long does entering a shop by hand take?
- It depends on the shop, but a typical weekly receipt runs to a few dozen lines. The slow part is usually deciding how to classify each item rather than typing the prices.
See it on your own receipt.
One photo of your shopping receipt shows what share of it was ultra-processed, and where the money went, line by line.
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