Show HN: Independent Vet – Find locally owned vets (and corporate ones) near you (independentvet.com)

2 points by packeted 2 hours ago

Three years ago, our dog was sideswiped by a car and my wife took him to the local vet in Berkeley. Unfortunately, things did not go well and to cut a long story short, he passed after 2 days and $13k of bills for very limited care. I was surprised to learn that the seemingly mom & pop practice had been acquired by a PE-owned consolidator and that around 50% of practices in the US are now owned by mostly PE-backed corporate groups - a trend that rapidly accelerated after COVID.

I started a small janky passion project called https://privateequityvet.org which used Leaflet.js to map corporately owned veterinary practices in the US. The site gradually took off, was covered on PBS Newshour and now gets 20k uniques a day.

A few months ago I launched IndependentVet.com which aims to be the opposite of the original site, helping pet parents in the US/Canada/UK identify locally owned veterinary practices. Just yesterday I launched native mobile apps that I developed over the course of three intense weeks of evenings and weekends using Opus 5.5. While it's early days, I'm really happy with how it turned out: https://independentvet.com/get

Would love to hear what you think!