Health, home and travel decision
VendPlacer
A small technical team or capable developer can build and run a useful VendPlacer replacement in about a week; the site’s public pages show no durable moats or proprietary data that would block a DIY option.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off40 h to build
$50/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- User searches or browses nearby vending-machine locations on a map; backend returns matching POIs and details.
What it still won’t have
- Proprietary POI coverage and data-cleaning done by the vendor
- Brand, existing user base, and any mobile apps or native integrations
- Operational support and SLA-backed uptime
- Any undisclosed indexing, ranking, or curated metadata the vendor provides
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
VendPlacer does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-tenant web app to find vending-machine locations using Next.js (React), Node/Express API, Postgres with PostGIS, and Mapbox for maps/geocoding. Core features in scope: import/export POIs via CSV, geocoding on import, radius search and sorting by distance, map view with pins and detail popovers, a minimal admin CRUD for POIs, and user-facing search by address or current location. Out of scope: user accounts, payments, analytics dashboards, mobile native apps, and multi-tenant billing. Include error handling for failed geocoding and CSV validation, unit tests for import/search endpoints, and a Docker compose dev setup plus deployment instructions to Vercel/Render/DigitalOcean.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score82
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 1
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productVendPlacer — Find Vending Machine Locations Near You
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
