A beer for €1 or €11: a beer-price map built by one person in Madrid, grown city by city through local newspapers

BeerMaps is a free app built by Jesús Fernández in Madrid. Open the map and you see how much each bar charges for a beer. It was listed on Google Play in Aug 4; by Nov 6 it had 7,007 installs, and in the last 7 days it added 3,042 more. Spain and the UK both had people try this idea without it taking off. It took off because the user-submitted prices became "where is the cheapest beer in this city", which local newspapers picked up as news. Below: how it got going, where the money comes from, who the competitors are, and whether you could copy it in another country.

An article on Zaragoza bars

On the morning of Aug 2026, 23 at 7, the regional newspaper El Periódico de Aragón published an article titled "An app reveals the cheapest bars for beer in Zaragoza: from 1.20 euros a bottle." The body basically recited the app's data: the map shows 160 bars in Zaragoza, mostly in the city center; for comparison, only 33cl bottles were counted; the cheapest is New York Café at 34 Calle San Vicente de Paúl, at €1.20, "on Friday nights and weekends you often see a big group of young people drinking beer here"; second place is Bokatines at €1.32; the most expensive is Garbo in Plaza Los Sitios, at €4. Only the last paragraph introduces the app: you can also see which bars show football, have table football, pool, darts, or a terrace, and registered users can add prices themselves.

The article was shared on the paper's Facebook and X. Three days later, on Aug 26, BeerMaps gained about 300 Google Play installs in a day (third-party estimate), its first clear step up since launch.

A month later the same thing happened in Madrid. On Sep 22, Madrid Secreto covered it, and on Sep 30 the national El Periódico de España followed, with the headline recast for Madrid: cheapest at €1 (a few locations of the Mana chain), most expensive around Puerta del Sol at €11.39, "same beer, different seat, up to 11 times more expensive"; the average in the Chueca district is €4.75, 57% more expensive than Lavapiés's €3.02. El Periódico de España's opening line was "in this economic climate, knowing where a one-euro beer is is almost essential." That week, installs went from 2,837 to 3,439.

What it is

One map, each bar's pin shows the price directly, calculated uniformly as "the cheapest beer at this bar, within 33cl." You can filter by beer brand, price, and amenities: whether football is shown, pool tables, terraces, gluten-free beer, or tapas pairings. Two other features keep people opening it: first, drink tracking, which logs how many drinks and liters you've had, how much you spent, and which bars you visited, with weekly and yearly reports; second, social features, following friends and comparing rankings.

All the data is user-submitted. Adding prices, adding bars, and writing reviews all earn points toward level-ups. The website homepage shows a weekly leaderboard; in Nov 6 the top three users each contributed 170 edits. The site says it already has over 10k bars, over 7,000 price entries, and 23k check-ins.

The founder carried the cold start himself. The article says he "spent months building a database by hand and collected prices from over 1,000 bars in Madrid." Early bad reviews reflect what it looked like when that work wasn't done enough: "hardly any bars," "prices are made up."

How fast it grew

Daily installs are third-party estimates; look at the trend only. On iOS, 70 ratings with an average of 4.74 (App Store, 11-06). Only Spain has a ranking, and reviews are all in Spanish: "¡Qué necesaria es esta app!" (this app is so needed), "useful for knowing where your money goes best and avoiding getting ripped off," "I wish I'd had this at uni when we drank in the city center with friends." Some ask for changes: show what tapa comes with each drink, and let users edit drinks and prices already logged.

Where users come from

Local newspapers, by far the main channel. Each article lines up with an install step-up. The data is news by nature: "which bar is cheapest in city X, what's the average, how many times more expensive is the priciest district than the cheapest," so reporters barely have to edit it. Most of Spain's local papers belong to the same group (Prensa Ibérica); the Zaragoza and Madrid articles both came from it, so once one city is written up, a colleague in the next city can easily write a similar piece.

City pages on the website. Pages like beermaps.app/bares/madrid are generated automatically by city and district, with titles like "Cheap bars in Madrid: beer prices for 2026 year," listing averages, district rankings, and the cheapest 5 bars, with "the rest in the app." The Madrid page as of Nov 5: 1,568 bars, average €3.28, cheapest €0.90, the Moratalaz district has the lowest average at €2.28, Salamanca the highest at €3.69. The homepage also lists more than a dozen cities including Barcelona, Zaragoza, Seville, and Bilbao. These pages are both search entry points and ready-made material for reporters.

One creator video. In Nov 2, an Instagram account named Manu Franco (username @manufrancoad, bio says "Creator Content") posted a recommendation Reel captioned "Do you know Beer Maps? Save this find!" That day Google Play added 1,942 installs, the biggest day since launch. Judging by the account's positioning, this was most likely a paid or swap collaboration (inference; the amount paid is unknown).

Its own short videos: TikTok @beermaps_app has about 1,300 followers and 60k total likes, with titles like "save money," "where to go this weekend," "watch the game." The volume is small; it counts as baseline traffic. No Meta ad spend found.

Where the money comes from

Free for users, no ads. The plan is to collect money from the bar side. The website pitch to venues: "Free first month for applicants · Your bar pinned on the map with logo · Publish your promotions and events · We help upload your drinks menu and prices." This is the old-fashioned local merchant advertising model. Whether any money has actually been collected, and how much, is not visible from outside.

Who it's competing with

This table shows one thing: "crowdsourced bar beer price map" is not a new idea, and the product features have no moat. Spain's Cerviza came earlier, and the UK's Tap Map came a year earlier; neither took off. What BeerMaps did extra was two things: the founder built out one big city's data by hand until it was enough, then turned the data into city-by-city "cheapest / most expensive" rankings and put them in front of reporters and search engines.

How well known it is

Very little. Revenue is not public, almost nobody discusses it on the English internet, and the only coverage came from a few Spanish local and regional outlets plus one creator. The scale is also small: 7,007 Google Play installs, 70 iOS ratings.

If it were you

Verdict: worth trying. This playbook is cheap, replicable, and no one has made it work in another country yet. The weak point is money: the user side can't pay, how much bars will pay for ads hasn't been proven, and one city's data has to be built by hand first.

Who it suits: someone living in a country where "bar price hikes" is also a national talking point (big cities in Italy, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Latin America; the UK already has Tap Map but it didn't take off), who speaks the local language, is willing to visit bars personally, review menu photos, and treats reporters as the main channel. Being able to write a data-driven news release matters more than being able to write code.

Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants to make money fast from the app itself; anyone unwilling to collect data offline who expects users to fill it in on day one (early bad reviews said "not enough bars"); anyone who only wants a single global English version (without local data, there's no local news).

How to do it: Pick one city and manually fill in the prices of 500 to 1,000 bars, with a fixed definition (e.g. "cheapest pint, under 33cl"), or you can't rank anything. On the product side, copy BeerMaps: prices shown directly on the map, filters by venue, a tab, points and a leaderboard. Then add the two things its users are asking for: the ability to edit prices, and seeing what snacks come with the drink. The category doesn't have to be beer: coffee, a set meal, car washes, parking all work, as long as people complain about price hikes and nobody has systematically tracked prices.

How to get users: Once you have the data, write your own "cheapest and most expensive 10 bars in City X, and the most expensive district costs several times the cheapest" and send it to local newspapers and city lifestyle accounts. Every new city gives you another news hook. At the same time, auto-generate search pages by city and by district, update them daily, show only the top few, and push the rest toward a download. Then find one or two local lifestyle creators to film "drink cheap" short videos. One BeerMaps video brought nearly 2,000 installs in a day. Hold off on charging until you have volume: first give bars a free month of top placement and see whether anyone is willing to renew.

Timing: This business isn't about holidays, it's about "nobody's doing it yet." BeerMaps is only in Spain right now. If it translates into Italian and Portuguese and enters other countries first, your "first story" there is taken. Give yourself six months.

Signs you're wrong: (1) You fill in a city, pitch the story, and newspapers don't pick it up, or the coverage comes out and installs don't climb. (2) After three months, user-submitted prices make up less than half of new data, meaning you're still filling it in alone. (3) The bar free period ends and almost nobody pays, and BeerMaps shows no sign of monetizing either. That would mean a fun product that can't support a business.