Daily Deals
Web App · Local Food Deals
Nobody keeps one list of which pub does wings on which night. This page tries to.
Pick a place, or let your browser find you, and Daily Deals shows the weekday food specials around it: Tuesday wings, Wednesday ribs, the $15 lunch. They are sorted by distance and filtered by day of the week, and every card links to the page that says so.
Where the deals come from
There is no public feed of restaurant specials, so the page was designed around two sources, each card labelled with the one it came from. Only the first is switched on today.
- A checked list. A short list of deals read off each restaurant's or chain's own website and typed in by hand, each with the date it was last checked. After 90 days a card is marked as possibly out of date. Only deals tied to a day of the week make the list: no every-day happy hours, no limited-time promotions.
- A web search (built, switched off). When it is turned on, a button hands the area to Claude through the Anthropic API's web search and web fetch tools. It searches, reads the most promising pages and reports the weekday deals it can source. The server keeps a deal only if its link is a page the search actually returned, so a made-up source cannot get through. Until then the button is hidden and the page shows only the checked list.
Finding what is nearby
Places come from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass API, which is free and often overloaded, so the page tries several servers, starts the next one when the first is slow, and remembers recent lookups in the browser. Chains are recognised by the Wikidata brand ID that OpenStreetMap carries, with the name as a fallback, and a Canadian chain's deal is never shown in the United States. Where the same venue is mapped twice, the fuller entry wins.
Privacy and cost
Your position stays in your browser. Looking up places sends OpenStreetMap a position rounded to about 100 metres. Once web search is on, it will tell this site only which 5 km grid square you are in, and one search will be shared by everyone in that square for a week.
Web search is the only part that would cost money, so it is bounded before it is ever switched on: a few searches per request, a time limit, a rate limit, and a week-long cache so that repeat visits cost nothing.
How it was built
Tariq's brief was one sentence: show any daily deals from food places near the user's current or entered location. In planning he narrowed it to weekday specials and chose a hybrid of a hand-checked list and an on-demand web search.
He also held the paid part back: "let's get everything else working before committing." So the web search ships switched off, its panel stays hidden until it is turned on, and the free, checked list carries the page. The page was tested live in a browser for places in Ontario and Texas, and 187 tests cover the deals code.
Tech stack: Next.js · TypeScript · OpenStreetMap (Overpass, Nominatim) · Claude API (web search and web fetch) · Vitest