Toba
An API-first data platform that tracks live building-material prices across Egypt and turns them into WhatsApp bulletins, posters and a monthly magazine for contractors.
Role
- Product Designer
Year
- 2026
Type
- Data platform
Results
3,667
Real prices loaded
Ministry of Housing bulletin, August 2026
460
Material variants
In 55 groups across 8 sections
20%
Largest move allowed per run
Bigger jumps are rejected, not published
The challenge
Building-material prices in Egypt, from steel and cement to marble, move almost every day. They are scattered across news articles and reach contractors as forwarded WhatsApp text that is hard to trust and, for many contractors, hard to read.
What I designed
- 01One trusted source of pricesEvery morning prices are collected from news articles automatically, but a price is published only if the article quotes it word for word, and none may move more than 20% in one run.
- 02Every number traceablePrices are kept as an append-only history, so any change can be checked against its source and date.
- 03Formats contractors actually readThe same live prices go out as a WhatsApp text bulletin, poster images, a printable newsletter, a phone-shaped monthly magazine in everyday Egyptian Arabic, and a spreadsheet that opens correctly in Excel.
- 04API firstThe dashboard is only the first client of the API, so partners can build on the same data with their own keys.
Why pictures, not just text
The project notes put it plainly: many contractors read text with difficulty. So the same prices are drawn as pictures, with a big number, an arrow and a colour per row, and the monthly magazine is designed for a phone screen inside a WhatsApp chat rather than for A4 paper.
Process
- 01
Collect
Prices are entered into an append-only ledger; market news is gathered from 8+ sources.
- 02
Serve
One public API with partner keys feeds both the dashboard and outside systems.
- 03
Market board
The dashboard: today's building-material prices and how each one moved, on one screen.
- 04
Publish
The same live prices become a WhatsApp bulletin, posters, a PDF newsletter, a CSV and a magazine.
- 05
Poster
Story-sized poster images made from the same live prices, ready to share.
- 06
Monthly magazine
A phone-shaped monthly magazine in everyday Egyptian Arabic.
Tools & tech