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.
Contributing back is something I’d genuinely like to do - the challenge is that bulk OSM imports require a formal community proposal, import account, and changeset review process, so it’s not as simple as a one-way sync - will work on that once will be more confident on the data quality. That said, individual fixes you add to OSM will flow into PlantsPack on the next sync.
For the fields that matter most:
If you’re updating OSM entries for vegan restaurants, diet:vegan=only is the highest-impact change you can make - that one tag is enough for PlantsPack to promote a place to the fully-vegan tier on next sync. We have 10+ steps verifications and enrichment process for each place, so even if places is not fully described on OMS - it may end up being better represented on our platform + we run extra checks to verify its vegan_level and status with Google API and AI checks.