A 27-year-old built an app that ranks 47 ulam by today's wet market prices
Chanryle Jay Cagara pulls the Department of Agriculture's daily price checks and sorts Filipino dishes from cheapest to most expensive. It is free, and it has passed 1,000 users since June.
A Filipino developer has built a free web app that answers the oldest question in the house. It is called Ma, Ano Ulam?, and it takes the Department of Agriculture's daily wet market price data, works out what each dish would cost to cook today, and lists Filipino dishes from cheapest to most expensive.
Chanryle Jay Cagara, 27, made it. He told BusinessWorld the DA checks prices at selected Metro Manila wet markets between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. and posts the numbers online, and his app fetches them from there. The monitoring covers more than 300 ingredients, from rice and pork to salt, cooking oil and sugar, at markets including Agora, Balintawak Cloverleaf, the Mandaluyong public markets and Pasay City Public Market.
I want my website to show the real market prices of chicken, pork and other goods so I can help Filipinos cook affordable meals.
Right now it costs and ranks 47 dishes, and gives you the steps, the serving size and the nutrition info for each one. The recipes are his own, the ones he actually cooks. He wants to get past 100 dishes, add a way to tick off what you already have in the pantry so it stops charging you for it, and eventually pull supermarket prices too. The app has crossed 1,000 users since it launched in June. He is aiming for 20,000 by the end of the year.
Why it matters
The DA has published this price data for years. Almost nobody reads it, because it arrives as a spreadsheet of 300 ingredients and no one converts that into dinner. What Cagara built is the missing step: the same government numbers, turned into an answer you can act on before you leave the house. That is the whole trick, and it did not need a funding round. Inflation eased to 6.4% in June from 6.8% in May, and food and drink prices slowed to 5.2% from 5.7%, but slower increases are still increases. Knowing that tinola is cheaper than adobo this morning is worth real pesos.
The catch to watch
The data is Metro Manila. Cagara said NCR is the main area with daily price monitoring, and Davao is the only other place he found with something similar. If you shop in Cebu, Iloilo or Bacolod, the prices on screen are not your prices. The costs are also estimates built on his own recipe portions, not a receipt, so treat the ranking as a guide to what is cheap today rather than an exact budget. And 47 dishes runs out fast in a Filipino kitchen. The idea is sound. It needs the rest of the country's price data to become genuinely national.