KAROL KUDYBA
News Writer

Need to know the best place for cheap wings on Thursday? How about a place for cheap pitchers on Monday? Either way, Saskatoonspecials.ca has your answer.

Saskatoon Specials is an easy-to-read database of all of the city’s food and drink specials. For every day of the week, the site has a list of restaurants and what they have to offer.

The site is the brainchild of local web developer Chuck Prongua. Like most of us, Prongua hates having to remember where to find cheap food on any given day.

“I got the idea about a year ago,” explained Prongua. “Like most people I like to go to a pub or lounge with my friends. I wanted to budget my money a little bit better, and the only problem was that I couldn’t remember where all the deals were off the top of my head.”

Sick and tired of having to remember where to go each day of the week to get the cheapest hot wings, Prongua saw a gaping need that had to be filled.

While the site required a lot of initial ground work, due to a family illness, Prongua suddenly found himself with a lot of time and nothing to do. Instead of doing what most people would, like dive face-first into a World of Warcraft account or recreate famous Renaissance paintings with cats, he decided to be productive.

Similar to MapQuest or IMDb, cataloguing all the deals that Saskatoon restaurants offer is not a complicated idea, nor a particularly hard one to put together; it just needed someone to put in the work. Before Prongua, no one was willing to.

“I looked into it and couldn’t find any other websites to help,” Prongua said.

Prongua would speak to waitresses, managers and anyone else he could find over the phone and slowly started to catalogue each and every deal. Just him, without help from anyone.

“I started with a few listings, but then if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it right, so I got all the information from all of the places and literally called them,” Prongua. “It took me about a week or two.”

Prongua added that, “as word of mouth got out, and the site got more traffic, establishments learned about it and they started calling me.”

Even with all the potential for uncertainty, with changing deals and the constantly rising cost of nachos, Prongua has only ever received one complaint due to faulty info. More and more, restaurants are contacting him as soon as their specials change.

Prongua makes no profit from the site, and recently launched a free iPhone app which can be found on his website.

Not wanting to play favourites, Prongua didn’t want to say what his favourite deal was.

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image: Pete Yee/The Sheaf