Localisio : a web service to locate public amenities

Where is the closest postbox ? ATM ? Bicylce parking ? Now you’ll know !

Localisio is a web service helping you find some basic public amenities around you (if your GPS is enabled) or around a selected point on the map.

Designed at first to locate the nearest post box for my own usage, I expanded its search features to other commonly looked for amenities, sur as ATMs or public drinking water taps.

How does it work ?

I intended the interface to be as intuitive as possible, with the least text possible (mostly because I don’t want to i18n messages).

This service uses OpenStreeMap layout and data, which are fetched by overpass API calls. If the service does not find anything under 250m, it will propose to expand the search radius by a factor 2, up to 4km before giving up.

If some results are found, the path to the nearest one will be computed by an API call to MapBox, considering you’re walking (which makes sense for now).

The service uses local storage to keep in memory the last point around which you search something, so you don’t always come back to Grenoble. You can also force the starting area by passing lat and lon parameters like this :
https://localisio.fr/?lat=44.82141707480402&lon=-0.5854456385772042

How much does it costs ?

For now it’s free to use, and I aim to keep it that way as much as possible.

However, I’m thinking about a pay-what-you-want premium plan (starting at 0$) kinda like the one Ninja-cookie uses. The premium plan will give access to some QOL improvements that I did not think about right now.

The goal of this pay-what-you-want premium plan is to :

• Allow users to put their own price on the service, depending on their own usage and ressources
• Contribute to the cost of MapBox API calls (the first 100k one are free but if it exceeds this number, there is a cost)
• Contribute to server maintenance, which I’m doing on my off-time
• Contribute to the development time passed

What’s next ?

I don’t know much of the upcoming features I’ll add. Maybe some kind of map point favorites, or more amenities stored as groups… Maybe different search radiuses depending on the amenities…

What I do know is that I’ll probably try to switch from mapbox to an open source solution, as it’s the only part of the project that’s not already open source.

You can find the sources on GitHub, along with the sources for the upcoming Android App.

– Special thanks to @PiotrKichiniev for his Cycle Parking locator, which provided the base for most of the code.