I Built a Free Happy Hour API to Find Drink Deals 🍹
Hi everyone 👋
I’ve been experimenting with small developer tools and APIs lately, and this time I built something fun: a Happy Hour API that helps you find restaurant and bar deals by city, zip, or coordinates. Here is the link to the website: https://happyhourapi.vercel.app/
It started as a tiny JSON file with three restaurants — nothing fancy — but it already returns structured data you can use to power a local deals app, a city guide, or just a Friday-night “where should we go?” widget.
💡 What It Does
The Happy Hour API gives you:
Restaurant name and address (including zip, lat, lon)
Happy hour start and end times
Menu items with discounted and regular prices
Optional fields for tags (e.g., “tacos,” “beer,” “half-off apps”)
Right now it’s hosted on Vercel and returns simple JSON responses—no authentication needed in this first phase. It’s lightweight, fast, and perfect for anyone who wants quick sample data for a restaurant or nightlife app.
🧭 Why I Built It
I’ve always loved finding good happy hours, but most apps are either outdated or location-locked.
So I thought: what if there was a simple, open API that any dev could use to display nearby deals?
This project started as a weekend experiment, but now I’m trying to validate whether it’s actually useful before I scale up the dataset.
📊 What’s Next
Add more cities (starting with Chicago)
Add filters by time and category
Release a public endpoint with city-level data
See if local apps, blogs, or developers actually want this kind of data
I’m not sure yet whether this will become a big project or just a fun open dataset—but that’s part of the learning process.
🧠 How You Can Help
Give feedback: What data would make it more useful?
Share it if you think other devs would like to experiment with it
If you want to follow along, I’ll post updates as I expand the dataset and track usage.