A plain-English explainer, written from a kitchen window in Lower Albany. Point your phone at a barcode, and Boet tells you watsit — what the thing is, what's in it, and how much you should trust the answer.
Watsit is a crowdsourced barcode lookup. Scan the barcode on a product — a box of Panado, a tin of something, a bottle of whatever — and Boet shows you a plain-language entry: the name, the brand, the ingredients or dosage, the warnings, the lot. The catch, and the whole point, is that the info comes from ordinary people who had the product in their hand, not from some official database. So every entry carries a trust score that tells you, at a glance, how much faith to put in it.
Think of it as the Nandex's cousin — same house style, same dry voice — except instead of measuring your Ront in chicken burgers, it's measuring how much you can believe a stranger who typed a product label into a phone.
Because the alternative is nothing. Official product databases are locked up, sold by the seat, or simply don't exist for half the stuff on a South African shelf. Nobody's going to hand you a clean API for what's in a bottle of cough syrup at the Slummies pharmacy. But people know — the person holding the box can read the label just fine.
So Watsit lets anyone add a product. And because "anyone can add anything" is exactly how you end up with rubbish, every entry gets scored on how trustworthy it looks, and the score is shown honestly instead of hidden. A green entry has been confirmed by real people. A red one is one anonymous submission with no photo — read it with your eyes open.
Every entry gets a score out of 100, built from five signals. Each one is worth a fixed slice, and they add up to 100:
That number lands in one of five bands. The colours aren't evenly spaced on purpose — green is meant to be hard to reach, and red is meant to catch exactly the entries you should be careful with. There's a peri-peri chilli count too, as a colourblind backup, same trick as the Nandex's cook indicator:
Every product page has a tap: Does this look right? If the info matches the thing in your hand, hit yes. That's it. No sign-in, no form. Your tap counts as one independent confirmation, and you'll watch the trust bar tick up as it registers.
It's the cheapest, most useful thing you can do on Watsit. A page nobody's confirmed is just one person's word. A page ten different people have confirmed is starting to look like the truth. Confirmations are counted per person and only for the last 30 days, so the score reflects current agreement, not a pile-up from years back.
Someone signs in and adds Panado 500mg with a clear photo of the box. Straight away it scores mid-range — a registered contributor, a good photo, most fields filled.
Then three other people, each on their own phone, scan the same box and tap Does this look right?. Three independent confirmations. The score climbs into light-green: multiple sources agree, current.
Nobody had to be an admin. Nobody filed paperwork. The entry earned its trust the honest way — other people with the same box in their hand said it was right.
Every product picks a category, and the category decides which fields the form asks for. It starts with a handful — medicine (active ingredient, dosage, contraindications, and the like), food & drink, cosmetics & toiletries, electronics, household goods, and other for anything that doesn't fit — and an admin can add or adjust categories over time. Medicine (and anything else flagged as medical) gets extra care — the entry carries a plain reminder that Watsit is not the leaflet in the box, and the leaflet wins.
A few ways in, in rough order of how much Boet trusts them:
Type it in. Anyone — signed in or not — can scan a barcode and fill the form by hand. Anonymous submissions are allowed; they just start lower on the trust score, which is fair.
Auto-filled from a global database. If you scan something Boet doesn't know yet, he'll check the worldwide UPC Database and, if it's in there, set up a starter entry for you. It lands low on the trust score and clearly marked as unconfirmed until real people give it a nod — plenty of local products won't be in there at all, so this just gives the common ones a head start.
Snap the label. Signed-in users with AI access can photograph the label and let Boet read it — Claude vision pulls out the fields and scores the photo in one go. Saves typing, and a clear photo lifts the trust score.
Admin review. Every submission lands in a queue. An admin approves it before it goes live, and approving counts as a confirmation in its own right — moderation as an act of validation.
Watsit is not medical, safety, or dietary advice. It's a crowdsourced index — a helpful starting point, not the last word. For anything that matters, the physical label, the leaflet in the box, and a word with your pharmacist or doctor beat anything a stranger typed into a phone.
A high trust score means people agree with the entry, not that the entry is guaranteed correct. A low one means be careful, not that it's wrong. Read the score for what it is — a measure of how many independent eyes have checked the thing — and keep your own eyes open too, boet.
The whole thing gets better every time someone scans a barcode or taps "looks right". You don't need an account to help — just a phone and the thing itself.
Open the scanner →Watsit is part of hey boet, alongside the Nandex. Trust scoring is home-grown; the barcode reading uses the browser's own scanner where it can, and a JavaScript fallback where it can't. Made in Lower Albany with dry humour and mild peri-peri.