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.
That’s a great point! We try to address it with shared experiences on city page, that will potentially impact the ratings moving on, so that people may raise the exact concerns you’ve shared about Tokyo. At the moment, as we’ve just started - there are not many reviews of places and close to 0 experiences shared, so it’s not impacting the ratings, but the core idea is to resolve this. That’s why we’re also trying to get more vegan-friendly stores, organisations, animal sanctuaries or vegan organisations etc. that may also impact the ratings, however it’s quite hard to gather the information in a good way for now.
I’d appreciate if you may share your experience living in Tokyo and/or your current city (let me know if it does not exist yet -> we may add it with 0 places for now or with your favourite supermarket) - this will help a lot. IN the end of the day - the platform is for people not to promote the city or place. Huge thanks for the comment - really appreciate this feedback :)