Show HN: Independent Vet – Find locally owned vets (and corporate ones) near you
independentvet.comThree years ago, our dog was sideswiped by a car and my wife took him to the local vet in Berkeley. Unfortunately, things did not go well and to cut a long story short, he passed after 2 days and $13k of bills for very limited care. I was surprised to learn that the seemingly mom & pop practice had been acquired by a PE-owned consolidator and that around 50% of practices in the US are now owned by mostly PE-backed corporate groups - a trend that rapidly accelerated after COVID.
I started a small janky passion project called https://privateequityvet.org which used Leaflet.js to map corporately owned veterinary practices in the US. The site gradually took off, was covered on PBS Newshour and now gets 20k uniques a day.
A few months ago I launched IndependentVet.com which aims to be the opposite of the original site, helping pet parents in the US/Canada/UK identify locally owned veterinary practices. Just yesterday I launched native mobile apps that I developed over the course of three intense weeks of evenings and weekends using Opus 5.5. While it's early days, I'm really happy with how it turned out: https://independentvet.com/get
Would love to hear what you think!
Can you share a bit on the development of this?
I'd be keen to hear what tech stack you chose and why, how you deploy it and any interesting architectural decisions you had to make!
I went with Cloudflare, primarily because I was already using it for a few other projects but I've been incredibly impressed with how it's scaled. I use D1 for my database, Workers for the API and schedule tasks (including using Claude API to pre-review images and submissions), R2 for self hosted OpenStreetmap tiles, encrypted user pet records and images. I use Clerk for auth. Wild that it costs $5/month to serve thousands of users a day.
Both apps are native. I use Leaflet for the web maps and Hugo as the website framework. I'll admit that my CI/CD pipeline is a bit Claude/Codex based which feels a bit fragile at times, but hasn't broken yet.
It's come a long way, the website started as a Leaflet + JSON flatfile with all the map points.
Wow! You have done a great job with this. This is definitely a growing issue as more hospitals get bought up and vets are pushed to prioritise profits
Thanks, I appreciate you saying so!