Two new states. 12,200+ new locations. ROLLIN now covers 15 states and 53 regions across the country. Here's what happened.
Short answer: because people kept asking for them. Long answer: because one of them was the most requested city since we launched, and the other one is personal.
Chicago was our number one request. Every week since ROLLIN went live, someone would email, comment, or DM asking when Chicago was coming. And fair enough. It's the third-largest city in the country with one of the best food scenes anywhere. If you're building a platform that helps people find accessible restaurants, you can't skip Chicago. So we didn't.
Colorado was different. I'll be honest, that one was personal. I've spent time in Aspen, hiked those mountains, eaten at restaurants with views that make you forget you ordered food. If you're building an accessibility platform, you should probably make sure the places you love are covered too. And Colorado's mix of mountain towns, college cities, and a booming Denver food scene made it a no-brainer.
Illinois brings 7,500+ locations across 4 regions. Northern Illinois alone, anchored by Chicago, has 5,271 scored locations. Colorado adds 4,700+ locations across 4 regions, covering the full state from Denver to Durango.
That brings ROLLIN's total to 105,000+ scored locations across 15 states and 53 regions. Every single one with a real accessibility score, not a checkbox.
In the first week of going public, 1,200 people used ROLLIN. We got traction on Hacker News, which was wild. The free API is live and developers are already building on it. The Python SDK got auto-generated by Stainless on launch day using the same tooling behind OpenAI and Stripe.
I'm not going to pretend I expected this. When you build something in your apartment for three months, you hope people care. You don't know they will. But the messages started coming in on day one and they haven't stopped.
The thing that hit hardest was the people who reached out to say "I've been waiting for something like this." Not developers. Not tech people. Just people who use wheelchairs and are tired of guessing whether a restaurant is going to work before they leave the house. That's the point. That's always been the point.
The next states on deck are Minnesota, Texas, and Ohio. If you live there, it's coming. If you don't see your state yet, keep asking. The squeaky wheel gets the data.
The goal is 1 million scored locations by the end of 2027. That sounds ambitious because it is. But the data pipeline scales well, the scoring engine is solid, and every new state we add gets faster than the last.
On the API side, we're cooking up some things for v2 that we're not ready to talk about yet. Let's just say the next version is going to change how developers interact with accessibility data. More on that soon.
New partnerships are forming. New people are joining the team. The infrastructure that was one person and a laptop is starting to look like something bigger. And honestly? It feels like it should be. The problem is too important for a side project. It deserves a real product with a real team behind it.
The single most impactful thing you can do is share ROLLIN with someone who needs it. Send them joinrollin.com. One link. That's it. If it helps one person go somewhere they weren't sure about, it was worth the share.
For updates on new states, features, and data drops, subscribe to our newsletter. We send updates occasionally and never spam. You can also follow my behind-the-scenes technical content on Dev.to where I write about the engineering decisions behind ROLLIN.
If you're a developer, the free API is live. Six endpoints. 105,000+ locations with real scores. Get a key in 30 seconds and build something that helps people go places.
The best way to help isn't money. It's telling one person who needs this that it exists.
Thanks for being here. Thanks for reading this. Thanks to everyone who's used ROLLIN, sent feedback, filed bugs, or just told a friend. We're building this together. Let's keep going.
-- David
Search Illinois and Colorado now. 105,000+ scored locations across 15 states.