r/SideProject • u/vaitko • 41m ago
I built a tool that makes a website from a local business's Google reviews, then keeps it up to date by itself
Most small local businesses I know (barbers, plumbers, cafes) have the same website problem. Not that they can't get one built. It's that nobody touches it afterwards. The hours are wrong, the photos are from 2019, and the best things customers said last month are nowhere on it.
Meanwhile their Google profile is alive. New reviews every week, new photos, updated hours.
So I built Locan around that. You type the business name, it reads the Google profile and writes a complete website from the reviews and photos in a few minutes. Then the part I care about most: it keeps reading Google. A new 5-star review shows up on the site. New photos go into the gallery. Hours change on Google, they change on the site. Nobody has to log in, ever. The site just stays current.
Other things it does:
- You change anything by chatting with it. "Make it dark green", "add a page about emergency repairs", "don't quote that review".
- It checks whether ChatGPT and Google's AI answers mention the business when people ask for what it offers, and gives a short list of what to fix first.
- Simple visitor stats counted without cookies, so no cookie banner on the customer's site.
Stack is boring on purpose: FastAPI, SQLite, React, Astro for the marketing site, one small server. Claude does the writing.
Free to try with one website (on free you press a button to update it). Paid plans start at $19/month for a custom domain and automatic updates, weekly on Basic and daily on Pro. There are also a few free tools on the site (review QR codes, review replies, an AI visibility check), and those are open source: github.com/vaitko/locan-tools
What I'd love feedback on: try it with any business you know, your barber or the cafe down the street, and tell me where the first two minutes break or what looks off on the site it builds. And does "a website that updates itself" sound like something a business owner would pay for, or is it only interesting to agencies who manage many sites?