Hey folks - spent the last few months building PlantsPack, an independent vegan discovery platform. No investors, no ads, no tracking beyond what’s needed.
The thing I actually want feedback on is the city scoring system rather than “check out my site.” Every city with ≥5 vegan / vegan-friendly places gets a letter grade A–F based on four dimensions:
- Accessibility - places per capita (adjusted for city size)
- Choice - how many distinct cuisines / categories are represented
- Variety - mix across restaurants, shops, stays
- Quality - review ratings + verification status
The goal is to answer “where should I travel / move to next?” at a glance, and to make it visible which cities desperately need more contributors.
Current coverage: ~37K places across 177 countries, mostly Europe + N. America + SE Asia. A lot of cities still score D/F because nobody’s added the places yet - that’s a data problem, not a “these cities are terrible” problem, and I’m trying to be honest about that in the UI.
What I’d love this community’s take on:
- Does your city show up? Does the grade feel right vs. your lived experience?
- Is the fully-vegan vs. vegan-friendly split a useful distinction, or do you want more granularity (e.g., “has vegan options but the staff sigh when you ask”)?
- What would make this more useful than HappyCow or Google Maps for you? (I’m not pretending to be better on coverage - but I am looking for more pain points to fix)
Happy to answer anything about the tech, the methodology, or the data. Source code is closed for now but the data model is open to discussion.
Just took a look at my city (Kiel, Germany). Very well maintained database. Almost every single restaurant and shop I could think off was present, the one that wasn’t I could quickly add.
The C grade feels fair, considering that there aren’t that many purely vegan places and availability depends heavily on which side of the city you live. Maybe a C+ would be okay too, if a grade like that exists.
I think the “Vegan Friendly” label needs some distinctions. There is a difference between a vegetarian burger store that offers every burger in a vegan variant and a kebap store that also has one vegan falafel option.
What makes it better than Google Maps? It is not Google, that simple. I haven’t used HappyCow that much to give a proper comparison.
What I DON’T like about PlantsPack is that it asks for your full name when signing up. It is not required, but that instantly made me not want to sign up until I realized the fields are optional. I am weird like that.
I’m really happy that our directory for your city was good enough and super happy that the place addition process was easy and straight forward. Thanks for contribution! I’m adding C+ and C- (and B+, B- ratings) to the system - this will improve the visibility for sure, let’s see where your city ends up.
I will work on a better distinction for vegan-friendly places, so that it’s more clear… current idea is to differentiate the places with dedicated vegan menu sections from those that have 1-3 vegan options, but long term idea is for community to rank those places lower, so that they still may be an optional snack-stop, but not promoted and celebrated as more vegan-friendly places.
Also adding the changes to UI to highlight that name fields are optional during sign up -> very reasonable point. PlantsPack is also GDPR compliant and we commit to not use any users data anywhere.
Thanks again and welcome to the pack! :)