Spored is a hyperlocal neighborhood app: browse local venues on a map, check in when you visit, claim and redeem business coupons, follow events, join challenges, and earn badges along the way. It’s launching first in Phinneywood, Seattle, but the data model and admin tooling are built to onboard additional neighborhoods without a code change — a neighborhood admin can draw a boundary on a map, and the nightly Google Places sync takes it from there.

The app is free for end users; monetization lives entirely on the business side, through claimed listings and credits for POIs, events, and coupons. Businesses get a dashboard to post events and coupons and track claims/redemptions, while neighborhood admins get their own tools for curating venues, running the boundary sync, and managing local events.

It’s a monorepo — a Next.js consumer web app, a Next.js marketing site, and an Express API (deployed as a Netlify Function), all sharing TypeScript types and Supabase/Postgres underneath. Turborepo ties the workspaces together. Still pre-1.0 and shipping fast — new features (coupons, event feeds, feedback submissions) have been landing every week or two.

Why

I love the neighborhood I live in, Phinneywood — I’m involved in community committees and volunteering there, so a lot of this comes from wanting a better way to surface what’s actually happening locally: the businesses, the events, the people. I’ve also wanted to build a location-based app in the spirit of old-school Foursquare for a long time. The name and the whole “spore” motif came from thinking about mycelial networks — the idea of an underground network quietly connecting everything in a neighborhood felt like exactly the right metaphor for what this app is trying to do.