About vaadagai.homes
An anonymous, crowd-sourced map of what renters actually pay in Chennai. Real rents from real renters. No broker, no login, no paywall.
Why this exists
Every rental portal in India shows broker-quoted asking prices, and those are almost always inflated. A 1BHK an existing tenant pays ₹18,000 for can be advertised at ₹26,000 to the next renter, and there is no public source of truth for what a flat actually costs. vaadagai.homes flips that: real renters pin what they pay, and each neighbour’s rent becomes the next renter’s reference point. The word vaadagai (வாடகை) is Tamil for rent.
How it works
1. Renters share what they pay. Tap the map at your flat’s location and enter the rent, BHK, and a few details. The point joins the public map, rounded to about 100m for privacy. It is anonymous: no signup, no account, and no IP address is ever stored in the clear or shown.
2. Everyone sees the real medians. Once an area has enough pins, the map shows the median rent per BHK, with a spread and a confidence level so you can tell a well-sampled number from a thin one. Rents far outside the local range are flagged and held out of the median until reviewed.
3. Owners can list directly. A separate marketplace lets owners post a place to rent or a flatmate request, with no broker and no fee. Owners share no public contact. A seeker who is interested requests a callback, sharing their own number, and the owner reads it from a private link and calls back. There is no automatic matching and no contact is ever shown on the map.
4. Watch an area. Optionally leave an email to be alerted when a new rent is pinned near a spot you care about. That is the only email the map itself ever asks for.
How it is built
The site runs on a deliberately small stack: Next.js and React, a self-hosted SQLite database, and a self-hosted vector basemap (Chennai extracted from OpenStreetMap via Protomaps) that the browser reads directly. There is no Google Maps, no third-party cloud database, no analytics, and no advertising network. Coordinates are rounded before they are stored, and IP addresses are only ever kept as a salted hash. See the Privacy Policy for the full data story.
No ads, no data sales
The map is free and stays free. Self-hosting the basemap and database means there is no per-request map billing and no metered cloud database, so the running cost is low by design. We do not run ads, do not paywall the data, and never sell it. The point is transparency, and the data is the product.
The mission, in one line: make Chennai rental data as transparent as it should be. Everything else is downstream of that.
Questions, feedback, or a correction? See the contact page.