Local Business Finder — OpenStreetMap POIs, No Key

A free, keyless building block for local lead lists — no Google Maps bill. Give it an area ("Shoreditch, London", "Austin, Texas") and a few categories ("restaurant", "cafe", "dentist", "gym"), and it returns every matching local business straight from OpenStreetMap: name, category, address, phone, website and coordinates. No API key. No Maps quota. No per-place Google charge.

You bring a place and a category. It hands back a clean, structured list.

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The flow

area + categories            Nominatim geocode            Overpass POI query           structured list
  "Shoreditch, London"   →    area → bounding box     →    all POIs in the box     →    name · category · addr
  ["cafe","restaurant"]        (free OSM geocoder)          for every category           phone · website · lat/lon

1. Geocode the area — the place name goes to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim geocoder, which returns a bounding box.
2. Map categories to OSM tags — "restaurant" → amenity=restaurant, "gym" → leisure=fitness_centre, "bakery" → shop=bakery, and so on (~15 common categories; unknown ones fall back to a name search).
3. Query Overpass — one Overpass API call pulls every matching node/way inside the box.
4. Parse + dedupe — one clean record per named business, capped to maxResults.

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What you get per business

For every named business in the area, the Actor returns:

1. name — the business name as mapped in OpenStreetMap.
2. category — which of your input categories matched.
3. address, city, postcode — assembled from OSM address tags where present.
4. phone — from phone / contact:phone.
5. website — from website / contact:website.
6. openingHours — the raw OSM opening-hours string, when available.
7. lat, lon — coordinates (the node point, or the way's center).
8. osmType, osmId, osmUrl — a direct link back to the element on openstreetmap.org.
9. categoryNote (optional) — a one-line AI positioning note, only when AI tagging is on.

Note on completeness: OpenStreetMap is crowd-sourced, so coverage and the richness of each tag (phone, website, hours) vary by area. Dense, well-mapped neighbourhoods return a lot; sparse rural areas return less.

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Three ways people use it

• Local lead lists — build a free, keyless list of businesses by category and neighbourhood for cold outreach, then enrich further (emails, website signals) with downstream Actors. local lead generation without a Google Maps bill.
• Market / territory mapping — count and map the cafes, gyms, dentists or hotels across a city or district to size a market, plan sales territories, or scout competitors.
• OpenStreetMap data extraction — a simple front-end over the OpenStreetMap API (Overpass QL) that turns a place + category into clean JSON, with no GIS tooling and no API key required.

Keywords: OpenStreetMap API, Overpass, local business data, no API key, local lead generation, POI extraction, geocoding.

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Input

Field	Type	Notes
area	string	Required. A place name to search inside, e.g. "Shoreditch, London" or "Austin, Texas". Geocoded via Nominatim.
categories	array	Business categories, e.g. ["restaurant","cafe","dentist","gym"]. Default ["restaurant","cafe"]. Unknown categories fall back to a name search.
maxResults	integer	Cap how many businesses to return. Default 200.
aiEnrich	boolean	Default false. If on, OpenAI adds a short positioning note per business (costs tokens, slows the run).
model	string	OpenAI model used only when aiEnrich is on. Default gpt-4o-mini.

Minimal input example

{
  "area": "Shoreditch, London",
  "categories": ["cafe", "restaurant"],
  "maxResults": 200
}

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Output example

{
  "area": "Shoreditch, London",
  "name": "Ozone Coffee Roasters",
  "category": "cafe",
  "address": "Leonard Street 11",
  "city": "London",
  "postcode": "EC2A 4AQ",
  "phone": "+44 20 7490 1039",
  "website": "https://ozonecoffee.co.uk",
  "openingHours": "Mo-Fr 07:30-22:00; Sa-Su 09:00-22:00",
  "lat": 51.5247,
  "lon": -0.0836,
  "osmType": "node",
  "osmId": 1234567890,
  "osmUrl": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1234567890",
  "categoryNote": null
}

Businesses with no name in OpenStreetMap are skipped. Address, phone and website appear only when the local mappers recorded them.

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Pay-per-event pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event billing with a single event:

Event	Charged when	Price
area-searched	Once per run / area — not per business. One charge covers geocoding + the Overpass query across all your categories, however many businesses come back.	$0.20

Because OpenStreetMap data is free, the price reflects the orchestration and optional AI layer, not a per-place data cost. Running one area that returns 200 businesses costs a single area-searched charge.

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Data source

Data comes from OpenStreetMap via its free, public services: Nominatim (geocoding) and the Overpass API (POI query). No API key is required for either. OpenStreetMap data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) — if you republish or display this data, please attribute OpenStreetMap contributors. The Actor sends a descriptive User-Agent and paces its requests politely.

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Setup

No key needed for the core list — geocoding and POI extraction run against free OpenStreetMap services out of the box.

OPENAI_API_KEY is only required if you turn on aiEnrich for the optional one-line positioning note per business. Without it (or with aiEnrich off), the Actor still returns the full business list.

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Use it from an AI agent (Apify MCP server)

This Actor is available through the Apify MCP server, so AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, or anything that speaks MCP) can call it as a tool — hand it an area and categories, and read back the local businesses — with no custom integration code.

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Run it locally

npm install
# put your input in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...   # optional, only for aiEnrich
apify run -p

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Related actors

• Google Maps Lead Enricher (AI) — Turn a pile of Google Maps results into sales-ready leads: emails, socials, website signals, AI score + opener.
• Company Enrichment API (AI) — Turn a list of domains into structured company profiles: firmographics, contacts, socials and ICP fit.
• B2B Email Verifier — Verify business email addresses: syntax, MX, deliverability.
• Domain WHOIS Intelligence — Registration, ownership and age signals for any domain.