Mandjesmeter
Projects | | Links: Live at mandjesmeter.nl
A live inflation meter for the Netherlands that skips the official average and reads prices at the source: supermarket shelves, petrol pumps, the energy exchange and the fixed costs like rent, mortgage and health insurance.
What does life cost today? Mandjesmeter (Dutch for “basket meter”) shows what the average Dutch household pays more than a year ago, per basket. There is no official statistic in it. Every price comes straight from the source, so you can check each one yourself.
Four baskets
- Groceries. 32 fixed products on the shelves of Albert Heijn and Jumbo, at the normal shelf price. Everything goes per gram, millilitre or piece, so a smaller pack for the same money counts as a price rise.
- Fuel. The pump price at about 3,800 Dutch petrol stations.
- Energy. Electricity and gas at the day-ahead exchange price, plus tax.
- Fixed costs. Rent or mortgage, and health insurance.
The figure at the top is one household worked out twice, once as a renter and once as an owner, and weighted by how many of each there are in the Netherlands (43% rent, 57% own). The two stay next to each other everywhere, because rent and a mortgage move very differently.
The tricky part: last year
“More than last year” needs a real price from last year. The open price archive behind the history sometimes repeated the same old prices for months. So a week only counts as a measurement when the prices in that store really moved. The charts show a dot at every real measurement and a straight line in between.
Also in there
- Mijn mandje. Fill in what you spend and get your own figure instead of the average.
- Tank calculator. Put a pin on your house and see whether filling up across the border pays off, with the real route and the fuel for the detour subtracted.
- More baskets. The whole online shelf of a supermarket, up to 34,000 products, as one index.
Stack — Next.js, Postgres and a small Python collector that reads the shops every day and stores only the changes. Self-hosted, with illustrations in a risograph style. A personal project.
