About

Why a real estate agent in Auckland built a national directory of cafés and motels.

Because the data already existed and nobody had made it usable. New Zealand's cafés, restaurants, hotels and motels are mapped in OpenStreetMap, registered with councils, and licensed under public registers — all of it open, none of it in one place. Meanwhile searching for somewhere to eat in an unfamiliar town returns pages built to rank rather than to answer, stacked with reviews of uncertain provenance and listings that paid to be there.

This site is the opposite bet: take the open data, add the things that can only be computed — density, mix, rarity, walking distance, hours you can actually read — and charge nobody to appear. It is funded by advertising, which is disclosed on every page it appears on, and by nothing else. No venue can pay to be listed, moved up, or left out.

It is one of a family of sites built the same way. Sideline does this for sport — every gym, studio and club in the country. A set of free business calculators does it for the numbers small operators have to get right. All of them share the same rule: the answer is free, the source is public, and the method is written down.

Built and maintained in Auckland. Corrections are welcome, and the fastest ones go straight into OpenStreetMap, where they improve everything downstream rather than just this page.