About Glowmeter

What we do

Glowmeter is an independent, public-interest price tracker for the cosmetics sold on Olive Young (Korea, US, and Global storefronts). We record the time-axis price curve for every SKU we observe and pair it with cross-merchant snapshots so shoppers can verify whether a "sale" is actually a discount and whether today's "lowest price" really is lower than the 30-day average. We have no affiliation with Olive Young or any cosmetics brand.

Data sources

• Olive Young KR / US / Global — public product pages, observed directly (5-min hot / 1-h warm / 24-h daily tiers)
• Naver Shopping — cross-merchant snapshots for the same SKU
• MFDS (Korean Ministry of Food & Drug Safety) — public cosmetic-report dataset (ingredients, manufacturer mapping)
• freetsa.org TSA — RFC 3161 timestamp anchoring of our daily Merkle root (tamper-evident integrity)

Operating commitments

• No VC funding · no advertising · no affiliate marketing
• No visitor tracking · no accounts · no PII collected
• Monthly operating cost capped at $30 (currently Hetzner CPX22, $9.49/mo)
• Full classification methodology published (crawler source stays private)

Team

Solo developer (doju). Contact: hello@glowmeter.beauty

Tech stack

Python 3.12 · FastAPI · SQLite (WAL) · Jinja2 · Chart.js · HTMX · Hetzner CPX22 (FSN1)

Browser extension

We're evaluating an extension that would put the price history directly on Olive Young product pages. There is no ship date yet, and we won't post one until it's a date we can keep.

In the meantime there's the bookmarklet — nothing to install, one click on any Olive Young product page takes you to that product's Glowmeter price history.

How the ingredient watchlist works

When an ingredient on your watchlist appears in a product's full ingredient list, a notice banner shows on the SKU page. Your watchlist stays on this device and is never sent to the server. This feature does not rate ingredients, recommend products, or call any non-EU-26 ingredient an allergen. It never displays a 'safe for you' state — an absent banner only means we found no match, not that a product is safe.