Prices in Iran, in your own language: how to know the real number before you pay
You are in Tehran or Mashhad, you want a phone, a fridge, a carpet — and the price tag is in Persian, in digits you cannot read. Price Finder takes your question in English or Arabic, searches Iranian shops in the words they actually print, and hands you real prices off the sellers' own pages.
It happens every day. You are standing in a bazaar in Tehran, Mashhad or Tabriz, you ask what something costs, and you get a number. That number might be the market price, or twice it, and you have no way to tell. The tag is in Persian, the digits are shapes you cannot read, and searching Iranian sites in English returns nothing useful.
That gap is what this app closes: ask in your own language, have the Iranian market searched in its language, and get back a number you can go and verify yourself.
- 3
- languages: Arabic, Persian, English
- 4
- Iranian sources searched at once
- 8
- vetted prices per question, at most
- Free
- for personal use
The hard part is not the interface, it is the query
Iranian shops rank their results on the Persian words they print on their own pages. Search «mobile phone» and you are searching for a phrase no Iranian retailer writes; they write «گوشی موبایل». The Arabic «ايفون ١٧ برو ماكس» shares almost no letters with the «آیفون ۱۷ پرو مکس» a shop prints. A literal search in your own words returns nothing, or returns the wrong thing — and that is a property of those search engines, not a fault in your language.
So your question is rewritten into the wording Iranian shops actually print before anything is searched, and the app then shows you what it searched for, underneath your own words. That line matters more than it looks: it is what separates “this product does not exist” from “we searched for the wrong product”.
| What you type | What Iranian shops print |
|---|---|
| mobile phone | گوشی موبایل |
| laptop | لپ تاپ |
| fridge | یخچال |
| vacuum cleaner | جاروبرقی |
| iPhone 17 Pro Max | آیفون ۱۷ پرو مکس |
Toman and rial: the mistake that costs a factor of ten
The official currency is the rial, but people and price tags speak in toman, and one toman is ten rials. So the same price can appear written two ways, one zero apart. In speech the zeros are dropped entirely: “nine hundred” normally means nine hundred thousand toman.
| What is written or said | What it normally means |
|---|---|
| “nine hundred”, spoken | 900,000 toman |
| ۶٬۹۰۰٬۰۰۰ ریال on a tag | 690,000 toman |
| ۶۹۰ هزار تومان | 690,000 toman |
Every price in the app is in toman, and it deliberately does not convert to your own currency: there is no single trustworthy exchange rate to build a number on, and a guessed rate is a fabricated price. Take the toman figure and apply the rate you actually changed money at — then the error stays yours and visible, instead of ours and hidden.
What one question gets you
- Up to eight prices from real shops, each with a link so you can check it yourself.
- The price read off the seller's own page, not a figure cached by an aggregator that may be weeks old.
- A “cheapest” badge that is never given to a stale price or an anomalous one.
- Anomalous prices — a tenth or ten times the rest, usually a currency-unit error — pushed to the bottom of the list and labelled.
- The date the price was last updated, wherever the shop publishes it.
- A day-by-day price history chart, so you know whether the market is heading up or down before you buy.
- A whole shopping list in one go: paste the names line by line or upload a spreadsheet, and get one saveable report back.
Using it
- Install it: Android on your phone, or Windows, macOS and Linux on a computer.
- Sign up with email or with Google.
- Pick your language, then ask the way you would speak — no Persian and no formal phrasing needed.
- Open the shop link whose price you like, or save the report if you are pricing a list.
Searches run from your own connection while you are inside Iran, which is why it works best here rather than from home. The download page is here, and if you would rather see what the results look like before installing anything, browse the published price pages — real prices for products people searched for, each with its date.
What it does not do
- It does not convert to your currency, for the reason above.
- It sells nothing and takes no commission: it shows you the price and where it is, and the purchase is between you and the shop.
- It cannot see a market stall with no website. It sees what is published online — which is enough to know the market price before you walk into the market.
- It will not bargain for you. It gives you the number to bargain with.
Knowing the market price before you ask for it changes the whole conversation: the question stops being “how much?” and becomes “is that today's price?”. Download the app and ask in your own language.