A grocery charge lands in my budget as one flat number: GROCERY $127.22. That tells me almost nothing. Did I buy food, or paper towels, or a single ridiculous cheese? breadcrumbs is a small, free, open-source browser extension I built to answer that question without typing anything in. It reads my own logged-in order pages and exports a clean, itemized file — every item by name, with what I actually paid — that a budgeting tool can then sort into real categories.
Tagline, because the mark is a toasted slice of bread with a receipt scorched into it: the toast that remembers.
Why a browser extension at all
The obvious first instinct was a headless script that logs in and grabs the pages. That died fast. One of the stores fronts its site with industrial-grade bot protection that blocks automated browsers before you even reach the login form — and it blocks the real browser binary too, because it fingerprints the connection, not the software. The only way past that is to forge the signals it reads, and that's a line I decided up front I would not cross.
So I flipped it. Instead of a robot pretending to be me, the code runs inside the browser tab I already opened, on the page I'm already signed into. No fake session, no circumvention, nothing that smells like logging in as someone else. It only ever reads a page a human (me) deliberately navigated to, and nothing leaves the browser. That constraint isn't a compromise — it's the whole design.
The one thing everything hangs on
There's a single file format in the middle, and keeping it stable is what makes the rest tractable. Each order normalizes to the same shape regardless of store: an id, a date, the charged total, and a list of items, each with a clean catalog name and the price actually paid for that line. "Price paid," not the shelf price — coupons and multi-buys mean those differ, and the paid number is the one that has to be right to the cent. Records key off the order id, so re-running a scan merges instead of duplicating. That's what lets a deep scan of years of history stop and resume safely.
Two stores, two completely different fights
The interesting part is that the two integrations I've built work in opposite ways. One store ships no structured data at all — its class names are build-hashed and churn every deploy, so I anchor on stable test-id attributes and visible label text and read the rendered page. The other is a modern framework site that server-renders the entire order as JSON into the page; for that one I just parse the embedded blob, which is cleaner in every way — real numeric prices, tidy names, no scraping fragility. Same export file out of both. A friend tested the second integration on their own orders, which was the proof that the store-agnostic core actually generalizes and isn't just bent around my account.
Each store has its own quirks the hard way: free promo items that come through at $0.00 but were really received (keep), out-of-stock lines with no price (drop), by-weight produce where quantity-times-unit never ties out (cosmetic — the line total is still right). I learned each of those by exporting real orders and watching them not add up.
Where it stands, and what's open
The Chrome version is done and verified end to end — multi-store, auto-detects which store you're on, and does both a quick "recent orders" pass and a slower full-history crawl with a progress bar.
The current work is a Safari/macOS port. The conversion itself was mechanical and the core ran unmodified, which was a relief — but Safari has its own personality in the popup layer. The download trick that works everywhere else just opens the file in a tab instead of saving it (the fix is to copy to the clipboard); a store icon renders as a blank box with no error to catch; and the popup gets a translucent backdrop unless you explicitly paint it opaque. None of it is hard, all of it had to be found by hand.
Open threads: a CSV export so the file works with budgeting apps beyond the one I use, and more store integrations down the road. It's MIT-licensed and explicitly an unofficial personal project — not affiliated with any retailer. It's a small tool that does one honest thing: turn a page I'm already looking at into a list I can actually budget against.