Local discovery is a search problem wearing a directory costume. Nearby, open now, filtered and ranked is not a database query. Agencies quote $40,000 to $180,000. We build a working core in one week for $5,000.
Not the screens. These are the parts that decide whether a local search and reviews site works or falls over:
Geo search with ranking. Combining distance, opening hours, rating and relevance into one ordered result set that returns fast.
Typo tolerance. People misspell business names constantly. You need a real search index with fuzzy matching, not LIKE queries.
Review integrity. Ratings are the entire product. Fake-review defence and one-review-per-visit rules matter more than the review form.
Photos at volume. User uploads that need resizing, moderation hooks and CDN delivery.
Business claiming. Verifying that someone owns a listing before letting them edit it.
The specific decisions that make a local search and reviews site hold up, and that the obvious version gets wrong:
A geospatial index, not a distance calculation. Businesses are indexed by geohash or quadtree cell, so "near me" is a bounded cell lookup. Computing the distance to every business and sorting is the naive version that dies well before a million listings.
Search engine for queries, database for truth. Ranking, filters and typo-tolerant matching run on an inverted index. The database stays the source of truth and the index is kept current by change data capture.
Ratings maintained, not recalculated. Average rating and review counts are updated incrementally on write, because they appear on every row of every result page and aggregating them at query time is pure waste.
One review per person per business. Enforced by a uniqueness constraint at write time rather than a check-then-insert, so a double submission or a retry cannot slip through.
Hot listings cached. Popular businesses and their ratings sit in cache with short TTLs, which absorbs a read distribution that is always heavily skewed toward a small number of places.
The gap
A studio quote for a local search and reviews site usually lands at $40,000 to $180,000 over four to nine months. We build a launchable core in one week for a flat $5,000, deployed on your own accounts, with every line of code yours to keep.
A working product you can put in front of real users:
Business listings with categories, hours, photos and location
Geo search with filters, including open-now
Full-text search with typo tolerance and ranking
Reviews and ratings with anti-abuse rules
Business claiming and verified owner editing
Photo upload with CDN delivery
And what we would leave out. Being straight about this is the only way a fixed price means anything:
Reservation and ordering integrations
Advertising auctions and promoted placement
Machine-learning review-fraud scoring
A human moderation workforce
You are getting the core of the same problem the big product solved, scoped to something launchable. Not a clone of the finished article.
Structural rules first: verified accounts, one review per visit, rate limits and reporting. Those catch most of it. Scoring models only make sense once you have real volume to train on.
Yes, because search runs on a proper index rather than the primary database. We size it to your expected catalogue during scoping.
A free 20 minute call. We will tell you if an app like Yelp is a fit for one week, and what it takes.
Start here: what it costs to build an app in 2026, or how the week works.