About NearEats

Who makes NearEats?

NearEats is made by Robert Jensen, founder and developer at 12F ApS, a small software company registered in Denmark. There is no team page to pad out — it is one person writing the code, choosing the data sources and deciding what the app will and will not claim.

12F ApS builds a handful of small, focused iOS apps. Contact runs through 12f.dk.

Why the app exists

The idea came from a specific, repeated annoyance: standing in an unfamiliar city, hungry, looking at a map full of pins that all say the same thing — that a restaurant exists. A pin does not tell you whether the kitchen is still serving, whether they can feed someone who is coeliac, or whether there is a step at the door.

That information does exist. OpenStreetMap contributors have been recording it for years — opening hours, diet options, wheelchair access, whether a place takes cards — and most apps simply do not surface it. NearEats is largely an exercise in showing what the open data already knows.

Where the data comes from

Two sources, merged. OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API provides the structured detail: hours, cuisine, diet, accessibility, amenities and payment. Apple Maps contributes venue coverage and addresses. A place found in both appears once, keeping the better fields from each.

This has an honest limitation worth stating: OpenStreetMap is crowd-mapped. Coverage is excellent in dense cities and thinner elsewhere, and a venue can change its hours faster than anyone updates the map. The app tells you which source a venue came from, and puts its phone number one tap away.

What NearEats refuses to do

• No ratings, reviews or user photos. No open data source provides them honestly, and inventing or scraping them would make the app worse. It shows facts and leaves the judgement to you.
• No paid placement. No venue can pay to appear higher in your list. There is nothing to sell them, because the app is bought by you rather than by them.
• No ads.
• No account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into.
• No data sold. Ever, to anyone.

What the app does collect — anonymous usage analytics, including session replay, sent to PostHog — is set out plainly in the privacy policy, including the fact that it is currently on by default with no in-app way to turn it off. That is not a comfortable thing to publish, which is rather the point of publishing it.

Why it costs $1.99

An app like this pays for itself one of three ways: you pay once, advertisers pay, or restaurants pay for placement. The second and third both mean the list you see stops being the honest answer to your question. Charging $1.99 at the door is the only one of the three that leaves the app's incentives pointed at you.

About this blog

The NearEats blog publishes practical guidance on finding somewhere good to eat. Posts are drafted with AI and then reviewed and edited by Robert Jensen before publishing, who is accountable for what they say. We would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.

The editorial rules the drafting follows are kept in public, in the repository, as prompt.md: never name a specific venue's opening hours or prices, never assert a named restaurant is good, never present an allergy check as a safety guarantee, and never state a local custom as a universal fact.

Get in touch

Corrections, questions, or something on this site that does not match what you see the app doing: 12f.dk. If something here is wrong, please say so — it is easier to fix it than to defend it.

Last updated: 27 August 2026