How to Create an App Like Yelp in Simple Steps

Millions of users rely on review apps to discover local businesses. However, creating a platform that stands out is challenging. Stfalcon’s experts reveal the key challenges and best practices for developing a top-notch review app in this guide.

Want to create an app like Yelp and revolutionize the way customers discover local businesses? Partner with us to build a powerful, feature-rich platform tailored to your vision. Since 2009, Stfalcon has developed numerous successful business solutions for nearly 350 clients worldwide. Our development team has seen what works and what doesn't.

Restaurant search apps like Yelp use a location-based approach to help you find places to eat nearby. How to create a local restaurant search app? Let’s find out.

Main Challenges in Creating Review Apps Like Yelp

Before we move on to how to build an app like Yelp, let’s review the challenges that come with it. By understanding the hindrances, you can create a strong product.

Generating Quality User Reviews

The biggest pain when building an app for reviews is getting the users to write helpful, quality reviews. Low-quality and spammy reviews reduce the platform's credibility and value. Use gamification, rewards, and an intuitive review process to encourage users to leave detailed, well-written reviews.

Based on our extensive experience developing apps, we've found some effective tactics for improving review quality and quantity. You must simplify the review submission flow, send well-timed push notification reminders, and publicly recognize top reviewers. Careful moderation is also critical for maintaining integrity.

Ensuring Accuracy of Business Information

For a review app to be helpful, it must contain accurate, up-to-date information about the businesses being reviewed. It can be challenging, especially for lesser-known or frequently changing establishments. It is crucial to allow business owners to claim their listings and submit updates while providing an approval process to validate changes.

Engaging Users and Driving Repeat Usage

With so many products competing for attention, getting users to consistently open and interact with yours is an ongoing challenge. A sleek, intuitive UI is just the beginning. Personalized recommendations, location-based suggestions, user-generated lists, and a community feel through features like comments, follows, and likes are keys to engagement.

Having worked on engagement and growth for numerous solutions, we leverage proven tactics to continually optimize the user experience. Push notifications highlighting new reviews, trending businesses, or time-sensitive offers can provide the right nudges. Periodic newsletters showcasing app activity or seasonal business selections help maintain mindshare. Seamless onboarding also plays a vital role. Integration with social media and a referral program also spur usage.

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Balancing Monetization With User Experience

Most review apps monetize through advertising and/or charging businesses for enhanced listings. However, you have to be careful not to hurt the user experience in the process. Ads should be unobtrusive and clearly marked. Upsells to businesses shouldn't undermine trust in the content. Freemium models that provide enough value in the free offering are often the best. We'd recommend diversifying revenue streams to avoid over-reliance on ads.

How to Create an App Like Yelp: Tips

Find Your Niche

Do more than replicate Yelp's broad focus. To differentiate yourself, you could target a specific vertical. Consider focusing on a particular cuisine, dietary preference, or even a specific location. Promoting less-reviewed businesses in your niche can also help you stand out.

Determine Your Target Audience

Understanding your core users' unique needs and behaviors is crucial for building an app they'll love. Are they locals looking to discover hidden gems in their city, travelers seeking popular spots to visit, busy professionals wanting the quickest solution, or people wanting the cheapest option?

Conduct market research to identify your potential users' demographics, preferences, and behavior patterns. Your target user profile should guide your design choices, features, and marketing.

Come Up With a Monetization Strategy

Yelp generates revenue through a combination of ads, deals, and business tools. Consider which monetization methods best align with your audience and business goals. Promoted listings, category sponsorships, affiliate deals, and premium accounts are all viable options. It works best to start with one or two clear revenue streams and expand from there.

Functions for a Restaurant Finder app like Yelp

Let’s identify what functions a restaurant search app like Yelp needs to be useful as well as easy and fun to use:

• Registration via social networks — with easy registration people will be using your app in minutes!
• User profile — a place to see all the reviews you left and to make friends.
• Location-based search and suggestion — a core function for a food finder.
• Restaurant profile — here users can learn whether any of that hip closest restaurants is actually serving the food they like.
• Adding to favorites/saving for later — make it easy for users to save nearest places to eat they like or want to check out later.
• Calling from the app — booking a table in food places nearby should be easy.
• Rating and leaving a review — in users’ eyes there’s nothing more convincing than an honest review of the best restaurants nearby.
• Adding user photos or Instagram integration — images are quickly processed by the brain and add an additional appeal to food apps.
• Admin panel — a place for managing and moderating content for your restaurant locator app.

Prototyping an App like Yelp

Neatly designed Home screen is an essential component of a restaurant search app. Taking into account the nature of the app, search should be in the heart of it. Here’s how it looks like in like as Zomato and Yelp features:

If the city is big enough, choosing from a list of places nearby can be hard, even with restaurant ratings and reviews being available in your food finder app. So you also need to provide some suggestions (top places for lunch, if it’s a lunchtime or hottest nightclub if it’s Saturday night), as well as categories available, such as:

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Drinks and nightlife
• Takeaway

One of the crucial Yelp features is a restaurant profile. Here users should be able to see all the important data (restaurant ratings, working hours, menu and cuisine type, reviews) at a glance. Since images are quite important both for finding a place sign and choosing a right atmosphere, they should also be present on this screen:

Review screen should be very intuitive to encourage people to leave reviews:

Getting Data for a Restaurant Finder app like Yelp

Data is at the core of an app like Yelp. Basically, you need a database of local cafes, diners and other eating places nearby. You can get those using Google Places API. But since Google prohibits usage of their services for creating your own content you can use it only if you specify where you get it from. And anyways, you’ve got to be ready to gather and process the data yourself or encourage users to do it.

As for the data, you should also decide whether you will provide restaurants access to their profiles so that they will be able to announce discounts, cross-post data from their social networks and build their fanbase inside your service. While users are most definitely the first to learn about a new hip coffeehouse that have just opened on their street, moderating and checking this kind of info might be quite time-consuming.

Coding a Restaurant Finder App Like Yelp

Apart from coding basic functions while choosing an app like Yelp development, you need to:

1. Add registration via social networks. Just as with dating apps, registration via social networks like Facebook will encourage usage of real identities. In order to do it you will need to register a Facebook Developer account and add Facebook SDK to your food finder app or you can use SocialAuthHelper library developed by our team.
2. Calling from the app. It is necessary for users to be able to book a table in the restaurant they like so adding a call button via Intent would be a great choice.
3. Adding user photos or Instagram integration. While adding restaurant food photos made by users might look like a simpler solution, it will definitely increase an amount of storage you will need. Plus, many people cross post to various services anyway. In order to allow users to add restaurant and food photos from Instagram, you will need to register with a Instagram API Platform.
4. Admin panel. What you put here depends on whether you grant restaurants access to page administration and whether users can add restaurants manually or it can only be done by the service admin.

How do Apps like Yelp Make Money?

As experienced developers who have studied business models in depth, we've taken a close look at how popular apps like Yelp generate revenue. Users can access Yelp's listings and reviews for free. Yet, the company developed many income streams to monetize its large user base. Let's review them.

Advertising

It is the primary way Yelp makes money. Businesses can pay to have their listing appear higher in Yelp search results or competitors' pages. These ads are clearly marked as "Yelp Ads" but blend in with organic results. Given Yelp's popularity, many businesses find the exposure worth the cost.

Enhanced Profiles

Another revenue source is enhanced business page features. Businesses pay a monthly fee to upgrade their profile, which includes more photos, call-to-action buttons, removal of competitors' ads, and enhanced analytics.

Deals and Gift Certificates

Yelp also gets a cut when users buy deals or gift certificates through the platform. Businesses can promote special offers, and the review app processes the payments. It's a win-win. Businesses get an influx of new customers, and Yelp gets a piece of each sale.

Reservations

For restaurants that use Yelp's reservation system, Yelp charges per seated diner. This software-as-a-service product simplifies restaurant reservations and has created another significant revenue stream for Yelp.

Yelp diversified its monetization beyond ads to prevent overreliance on one income source. As app developers ourselves, we appreciate the thoughtful revenue model Yelp has built. By offering free value to users to drive mass adoption and then providing paid enhancements businesses find worthwhile, Yelp has achieved impressive profitability. It's a model many apps can learn from.

Tech Stack For Yelp-like App

Yelp relies on the tried-and-true LAMP stack. It includes Linux Ubuntu, Apache, MySQL, and Python or PHP. While this stack has worked for Yelp, there are other technologies with which an app like Yelp can be built.

At Stfalcon, we use a wide range of technologies to develop robust yet scalable applications. Our technology stack involves:

- Mobile Front-end. We primarily develop native mobile applications using Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS.

- Web Front-end. Our web front-end is built using HTML, JS, and CSS. Depending on the chosen framework, we use either Nuxt 3 with Vue 3 and SCSS or Next with React.

- Back-end. We use PHP with the Symfony framework. Depending on the project's size, we opt for either a monolithic or microservice architecture. We use GoLang to load highly loaded microservices.

- Database. Depending on the service's specific needs, we use either PostgreSQL or MongoDB as our database solution.

- Object Storage. We utilize AWS S3 and GCP Cloud Storage to store and manage large amounts of data.

We also have experience with Ruby on Rails and Java for online platforms. We believe that technology should be chosen based on the project's particular needs. Therefore, we work hand in glove with the client to choose the best stack for this particular need.

How Much does it Cost to Create a Yelp-like App?

If you want to build the next great business review app, one of your very first questions is likely to be: how much is it to build a mobile app like Yelp? Of course, creating such an extensive feature set as Yelp is no trivial task. Yet, with the right team behind the project, it's a challenge well within the grasp of many businesses. Several key pieces need to come together when you are making a web app like Yelp:

UX/UI Design

Cost range: $5,000 - $25,000+

A good user experience is a must for any application. In the case of the Yelp-like application, properly designed and easy-to-use screens for browsing, searching businesses, writing reviews, looking at business information, and much more will be required. The cost of the UX/UI design can range from the app's difficulty level and the designer's level. It may take at least several weeks of a designer’s time.

iOS and Android App Development

Cost range: $15,000 - $100,000+ per platform

Building two high-quality, native apps takes substantial development time - likely several months at least. The bulk of your development budget will go toward implementing features like

- user registration;

- business search and discovery;

- reviews and ratings;

- mapping and geolocation;

- user profiles;

- push notifications.

Backend Infrastructure

Cost range: $20,000 - $100,000+

A robust backend needs to support all those app features. This means setting up databases to store business and review data. It also involves building APIs for your apps to communicate with the backend, implementing server-side business logic, and creating systems for search, user authentication, and push notifications.

Admin Web Portal

Cost range: $15,000 - $35,000

For a Yelp-like app, you'll likely want a web-based portal where you can administer your app, manage your business listings, moderate user content, view analytics, and perform other vital tasks. It will require additional web development time.

Testing and Quality Assurance

Cost range: $5,000 - $25,000

Before launching your product to the world, test it to ensure it's reliable, performant, and bug-free. QA isn't glamorous, but it's essential. Expect to spend at least 10-20% of your total development budget on testing.

Finally, adding all these components together, the total cost for an MVP version of a Yelp-like app will likely be around $50,000. Costs for more polished and full-featured versions can rise to $150K —$300K or more.

Of course, those are rough estimates. The real price for your Yelp-like app depends on specific requirements and the hourly rates of your development team. At Stfalcon, we always work side by side with our clients to provide them with an as detailed plan as possible and estimate costs thereafter. Our extensive experience allows us to predict some pitfalls, optimize development processes, and provide as much value for your budget as possible.

Here is more on what you need to know about how to make an app like Yelp.

Conclusion

An exact set of functions for a restaurant finder app like Yelp will depend on the scale, monetization model, the process you choose to use for adding new venues. You should also be aware that users come to your app for reviews and photos of interior and food so prior to launch your team has to prepare a decent amount of content so that your restaurant search app will provide enough value to its first users.

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