OpenStreetMap Local Business Directory

Build a clean local business directory from OpenStreetMap data. Give a place name (or a bounding box) and pick categories such as restaurants, cafes, dentists, hardware stores, gyms or hotels. You get one flat, CSV-friendly record per business with its address, coordinates, category, cuisine and other useful tags, plus website, phone and opening hours when they are tagged as business contact data. Every record carries the OpenStreetMap attribution and license details.

The data comes from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass API. No login, API key or proxy is needed. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, the Overpass API operators or any other third party named here.

Who it is for

• Marketers and sales teams building a prospect list for a town or district
• Local SEO and directory builders who need a starting list of businesses
• Researchers and analysts mapping where certain kinds of business are located
• Developers who want a normalized OSM point-of-interest feed without writing Overpass queries

What it does

1. Looks up the administrative boundary of your place in OpenStreetMap, or uses your bounding box.
2. Runs one Overpass query for the categories you selected.
3. Drops unnamed features, anything tagged as a private residence, and any feature whose name looks like a private individual's home.
4. Normalizes each feature into a flat record and removes duplicates.
5. Returns up to your maximum, charging per business returned.

Input

Field	Meaning
Place name	For example Rochester, Minnesota. Add a region or country to avoid mix-ups between towns with the same name.
Bounding box	Optional. south,west,north,east, for example 43.95,-92.55,44.08,-92.38. Replaces the place name. Maximum 16 square degrees.
Business categories	Presets: restaurants, cafes, fast food, bars and pubs, bakeries, dentists, doctors and clinics, pharmacies, veterinarians, hardware stores, supermarkets and grocery, gyms, hotels and lodging, hair and beauty, car repair, car dealers, banks, gas stations, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, insurance agencies, clothing and shoe stores, bookstores, florists, laundry and dry cleaning.
Extra OSM tags	Optional key=value pairs such as shop=books or craft=brewery. Allowed keys: amenity, shop, craft, office, tourism, leisure, healthcare.
Name contains	Optional filter on the business name.
Maximum results	Default 25, up to 2,000.
Remove duplicates	On by default.
Include website, phone and opening hours	On by default.
Include all OSM tags	Off by default. Adds a tags column with the feature's other tags as JSON text.
Overpass endpoint	Advanced. Leave empty for the default public instance, or enter your own or a paid Overpass server.

Example input (this is also the default prefill):

{
    "place": "Rochester, Minnesota",
    "categories": ["cafes"],
    "maxResults": 25
}

Output

One record per business. All values are plain strings, numbers, booleans or null, so the dataset exports cleanly to CSV and Excel.

{
    "osmType": "node",
    "osmId": 123456789,
    "osmUrl": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/123456789",
    "name": "Example Coffee",
    "category": "Cafe",
    "categoryKey": "amenity=cafe",
    "cuisine": "coffee_shop",
    "houseNumber": "123",
    "street": "Main St",
    "city": "Rochester",
    "state": "MN",
    "postcode": "55901",
    "fullAddress": "123 Main St, Rochester, MN 55901",
    "latitude": 44.0121,
    "longitude": -92.4802,
    "website": "http://example.com/",
    "phone": "+1 507 555 0100",
    "openingHours": "Mo-Fr 07:00-17:00",
    "lastEditedAt": "2025-06-14T17:22:05Z",
    "dataSource": "OpenStreetMap via Overpass API",
    "attribution": "© OpenStreetMap contributors",
    "license": "ODbL 1.0",
    "licenseUrl": "https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/",
    "osmDataTimestamp": "2026-10-21T23:20:00Z",
    "queryArea": "Rochester, Minnesota (OSM relation 184106)"
}

The example values are illustrative. Real records are returned from live OpenStreetMap data, and fields that are not tagged for a feature are null. For ways and relations (buildings and areas), latitude and longitude are the feature's center point. A run also saves a SUMMARY record in the key-value store with counts of fetched, excluded and duplicate features.

Pricing

Pay per event. You pay only for businesses returned, never for failed runs or empty results.

Event	Price
Actor start	$0.00005 per run (set by Apify)
Business record (poi-record)	$0.002 per business returned

For example, 1,000 businesses cost about $2.00. Apify platform usage is included in these prices. A 25-business run uses well under one cent of platform compute.

Data source, license and what you must do with it

All data is copyright OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. Details: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

• Attribution: wherever you publish or show this data, credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors". Every record carries this credit in its attribution field.
• Share-alike: if you publicly use a database that you derived from this data (for example a combined directory you publish or sell access to), you must offer that derived database under the ODbL as well, and keep the attribution. Producing a work from the data, such as a map image or a report, is treated differently from publishing a derived database; read the license if you are unsure.
• Keep the license and attribution fields with the data when you pass it on.

This summary is not legal advice. The license text is the authority.

Fair use of the public Overpass server

The Actor uses the NextGIS Overpass service (listed by its operator as free with no request limits) and falls back to the public instance overpass.private.coffee (whose operators say it is open for commercial use with no registration and ask for advance notice of large operations such as more than ten requests per second) if NextGIS cannot answer. Each run sends at most a handful of requests, one at a time, at least five seconds apart, with a descriptive User-Agent that includes the contact address chris@jetlaunch.net. After HTTP 429, 406, 502, 503 or 504 it waits at least 30 seconds and retries a few times, then fails clearly without charging. It does not use Nominatim, which forbids bulk geocoding. It does not call the main overpass-api.de instance, because that instance asks commercial and app traffic to use self-hosted or paid servers. You can point the Actor at your own or a paid Overpass server in the advanced field.

Privacy

Features tagged as dwellings (house, apartments, detached and similar building types), residential features, features with private access, and features whose name looks like a private individual's home (for example "Smith Residence") are excluded. Contact fields are returned only for named business features that pass these checks, exactly as tagged in OpenStreetMap. No email addresses or mapper user names are returned.

FAQ

Why are some businesses I know missing? OpenStreetMap is edited by volunteers. A business may be unmapped, unnamed, or mapped with a different tag. Try extra tags, or check the SUMMARY record to see what was excluded.

Why is a phone number or website empty? Only about some of the features carry that tag. The Actor never looks anything up outside OpenStreetMap.

Why was a business in a house excluded? Features whose building tag marks a dwelling are excluded on purpose to protect private residences. This can also drop a few genuine businesses located in houses.

How fresh is the data? The osmDataTimestamp field shows the age of the server's copy, usually within minutes of the live map. lastEditedAt shows when each feature was last edited.

Can I search a whole state or country? No. The area limit keeps queries small enough for the public server. Use cities, counties or districts. For planet-scale needs, use an OSM extract such as Geofabrik instead.

Limitations

• Runs usually take about 2 to 5 minutes. The free public server queues requests, and the Actor sends only one or two per run, so most of the run time is waiting.
• The public server's copy of the map is not always current. In testing, copies dated June and July 2026 were served in October 2026. Check osmDataTimestamp on each record.
• Coverage and tagging quality vary by region.
• Results are not ranked. When the maximum is lower than the number of matches, you get the first ones the server returns, in map-tile order.
• Public Overpass servers can be busy. If the server cannot answer, the run fails with a clear message and nothing is charged.
• Business hours and contact details are as tagged by volunteers and may be out of date.

Support

Questions, bug reports or feature requests: use the Issues tab of this Actor.