Building Balitaan: Crowdsourced Price Discovery ('Presyo sa Mapa') with Next.js & Laravel

Answering "What Does This Cost Near Me Right Now?"

Balitaan started with a practical everyday question for Filipinos: what do commodities and essentials actually cost in my area today?

To practice architecting for large-scale social data, I built Balitaan with a Next.js + TypeScript frontend backed by Laravel, PostgreSQL, and Redis: - Character-First Onboarding: Instead of asking for personal selfies, users pick from custom Filipino cultural characters to stay private while contributing. - For You & 5km Nearby Feeds: Combining algorithmic interest tuning with a 5km radius proximity feed. - Presyo sa Mapa: Plotting crowdsourced price reports across the Philippines.

While I archived the public deployment due to the recurring server and hosting costs of running a large-scale social app solo, building Balitaan pushed my full-stack system design further than almost any other personal project.