Derek, thanks so much for Saturday, and thank you for the note about timing. You said there was no rush on your end, so I took you at your word and used the time to put this together properly rather than firing something back the same night.
This covers everything I promised you, plus the list you asked for. I've put that list first since it's the part you can actually act on. I've also linked the official Wix documentation throughout, so you can check anything I'm claiming rather than just taking my word for it.
You asked for a short list. It came out slightly longer than short, but I've ordered it so the things at the top matter most, and I've been honest about which ones actually reduce the cost and which ones just reduce the risk.
None of this needs doing before you decide anything. But the top three are useful whichever direction you go, and none of them cost you money.
This is the one you mentioned, and it's the most valuable thing you could hand over. The tiers drive the ranking logic, the badges, the dashboard and half the admin console. If we design the database before this is settled, we're guessing.
To make it easier, here's a starting point you can edit rather than a blank page. Change anything, delete anything, add anything.
| Tier | Price | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Claimed (free) | $0 | Name, category, town, one photo, one-line description. Appears in search and on the map, sorts below paid listings. |
| Standard | ~$12–15/mo | Photo gallery, full description, opening hours, tap-to-call, tap-for-directions, website or social link, basic monthly stats. |
| Featured | ~$25–30/mo | Everything above, plus priority placement in its category, the TOP PICK badge, eligibility for Popular Near You, and full stats. |
| Partner (hidden) | Trade | Featured level, assigned by you only, never shown publicly, with an expiry date and a note recording the trade. |
Worth answering while you're in there: monthly only or annual as well, whether annual gets a discount, and whether the founding fifty lock their rate permanently.
Your mock had Beaches, Adventure, Food & Drink, Lodging, Wildlife, Culture, Wellness and Shopping. Does that hold, and do any need subcategories? For food, does it split into restaurants, cafés, bars, sodas, street food?
More important is the towns. You mentioned five or six along that stretch, ending at Manzanillo. I need them in the order a traveller would come across them, with the province each sits in. This becomes the region hierarchy, and it's the piece that lets you expand later without a migration.
You're on Gmail at the moment. Whatever the domain ends up being, register it now even if nothing goes on it for months. Domains get taken, and an aged domain performs measurably better in search than one registered the week you launch.
A business email on that domain matters too, since you'll be emailing Costa Rican owners asking them to trust you with a subscription.
Exactly as you described it. A dummy site in regular Wix showing what you want it to look like. Four screens is plenty: home, search results, a single listing page, and roughly what a business sees when they log in.
Keep it purely visual. Don't wire anything up, don't create collections, don't connect datasets. That work would get thrown away, and I'd much rather you spent the time on layout and feel.
Logo in vector if you have it, otherwise the highest resolution version you own. Colour codes and any fonts you want. The sloth logo in your mock is strong, and if it was AI generated it's worth having someone redraw it properly as a vector, because you'll need it clean for app icons and printed table tents later.
This is the one to hand to your local contacts, and it's the item most likely to hold up launch if it starts late. We'll build a bulk import so a finished spreadsheet loads in one go rather than anyone typing 200 records by hand.
Columns: business name, category, subcategory, town, province, latitude, longitude, phone, WhatsApp, email, website or Facebook page, owner's name, whether you or your contacts know them personally, and a notes field.
That personal-contact column matters more than it looks. It becomes your claim priority order.
Directory quality lives or dies on photos, and this is expensive to buy and free for you to gather. What helps most: a strong hero shot for each town, one usable photo per business, and something for each category header. Phone photos in good light are completely fine.
Recurring subscriptions need a payment provider connected to a business entity and a bank account. You're collecting in USD from businesses paying out of Costa Rica, which works fine, but the account has to exist before anyone can subscribe. Worth starting early because verification can be slow.
Three that affect the build: are reviews moderated before they publish or after, can a business reply to a review, and do travellers verify their email before posting. Plus terms of service and a privacy policy, which you need for taking payments now and for the App Store later.
Don't buy a Wix premium plan. The right plan depends on the database design, and buying the wrong one now just means changing it later.
Don't start entering listings anywhere. Not into Wix, not into anything live. The spreadsheet is safe. Anything entered before the database design exists will need re-entering.
Don't commission a full brand redesign. What you have is good enough to launch with, and you'll know far more about what the platform actually needs after six months of real use.
Wix Multilingual handles everything you write. Menus, buttons, page titles, category names, your own copy. That's the part you said mattered, and it's straightforward.
What it doesn't handle is content your business owners write. This isn't my interpretation, it's stated directly in Wix's own documentation. On their page listing what can and cannot be translated, under Members Area, Wix say plainly that a site member's content stays in the language they wrote it in. The same note appears under Groups. Worth reading yourself: Wix Multilingual: Translatable Content.
A few other details from their documentation that shape the design, so you have them on record:
On the call you said listing-level translation might not be a big priority, and having thought about it since, I agree with you. Your reasoning was good. Photos say more about a restaurant than a paragraph does, and machine translation of a small family place's own words often makes them read worse, not better.
The four language fields go into the database now, even if three of them sit empty. This costs nothing today and it's the single most expensive thing to add later, because putting them in once you have 180 live listings means someone re-enters every record by hand.
So: interface in four languages from launch, listings in whatever language the owner writes them, fields sitting there ready. If German listings matter in two years, we switch it on instead of rebuilding.
This takes real money out of the Scale stage and I've reflected that in the numbers below.
You corrected me on this during the call and you were right. What I had came from sources written for the Pacific coast, which is exactly the problem you were describing. Here's your version.
Driest is March, September and October. Busiest is November through January, April for Easter, and June to July. They barely overlap, and as you put it, your friends get the beautiful weather exactly when there's no work.
You said you want to sign businesses during a busy period so their renewal also lands in a busy period. That's sharper than it may have sounded when you said it, and it's worth designing for rather than just remembering.
Sign a business in November and they renew in November, when they have cash and have just had a good season. Sign them in September and they renew in September, which is beautiful and empty. We can build the subscription setup so you control the billing anchor date, meaning you can sign someone in September and set their first full cycle to begin in November. Small piece of logic, real difference to your churn.
You described the gap exactly. People read that December to April is the best time to visit Costa Rica, arrive on the Caribbean coast, and it rains for ten days. Every major platform gets this wrong because they treat the country as one climate.
A best-time-to-visit section that tells the truth about your coast is a small build, and it's the kind of page that earns links and search traffic over time. It's also a straight argument when you're selling: we send you travellers in September and October, when everyone else is telling them to stay away.
You said you're afraid that giving away a lot of free listings makes it hard to convert anyone to paid, and that it's a fine line to walk. That's the right thing to worry about and it's what kills most directories. Here's what my team came back with. Take what's useful and ignore the rest.
A free listing should never look broken, because that makes the whole directory look thin. What it should lack is everything that turns a browser into a customer. Name, category, town, one photo and a short line, yes. Tap-to-call, tap-for-directions, gallery, hours, website link and any placement above a paid listing, no.
The pressure then comes from the business seeing their own entry next to a paid one, rather than from you having to ask.
This is the one I'd push hardest. Rather than a permanent free tier, every seeded business gets ninety days at the full paid level from the moment they claim it. Gallery, contact buttons, placement, stats, all of it. Then it drops back unless they pay.
People will pay to stop losing something far more readily than they'll pay to gain it. And if you time claims to November and December, their ninety days covers your busiest window and expires right as they're deciding about the next one.
This is why I put per-listing statistics into the launch build rather than holding it back. When an owner logs in and sees your listing was viewed 340 times this month, 22 people tapped for directions, 14 tapped your phone number, that isn't a sales pitch, it's evidence. Add one line underneath showing what featured listings averaged and the upgrade argues itself.
Without it, a $20 subscription is invisible and it churns by month three. With it, it's the cheapest marketing they buy all year.
This one goes against what you said, so please push back if you disagree. You mentioned using Manzanillo as the model, mostly free accounts, then working up the coast.
The risk is that when you walk into Puerto Viejo and say everyone in Manzanillo is on the platform, the next question is whether they're paying. If the answer is no, the evidence collapses, because a town full of free listings only proves that people accept free things.
Even five dollars a month, or a founding rate of ten locked permanently, changes that conversation completely. You'd be walking in able to say twenty-five businesses in Manzanillo are paying customers. And given you've been going there ten years and know nearly everyone, a small number from people who like you is a far easier ask than it would be anywhere else on that coast.
First fifty businesses lock their rate for life. If Standard is $15, founders pay $10 and keep it permanently. It rewards the ones taking a risk on something unproven, it gives your in-person push a deadline, and it gives your tour guide contacts something concrete to open with.
Wording matters more here than it should. Claim your listing implies it's already theirs and something is being held back. Sign up implies work. The claim link should go out with a picture of their live listing attached, so they see the thing before they decide anything.
I'd suggest any unclaimed marker stays visible only to the business arriving through their own link, and never to the public. A directory covered in unclaimed badges looks abandoned.
Yes, this works, and it's a better idea than you gave yourself credit for on the call.
What you're describing with the table tents and QR codes is barter, and it's a legitimate growth channel, because those table tents are how travellers discover the platform in the first place. A restaurant where people sit waiting for food is close to a perfect place to get an app downloaded.
Partner would be a real tier in the system, so all the ranking and feature logic treats it normally, but assigned by you from the admin console and never visible in the public signup flow. Three guardrails I'd want on it:
You asked whether Wix limits what you can control visually on an app, and mentioned reading conflicting things online. Both sets of things you read are true, because Wix has two completely different products and most articles don't say which one they mean.
Wix's own mobile app product. Your logo, colours and content, delivered inside Wix's app framework.
Visual control is limited. You choose from set layouts and theme options. You don't control pixel placement, custom navigation or bespoke screens.
Fast and cheap, and genuinely fine for a membership site or a booking business. Not right for you, because GPS recommendations, offline content and custom map screens sit outside what it does.
A real iOS and Android app that talks to your Wix database, member accounts and subscriptions through Wix's published APIs.
Complete visual control. Every pixel, every screen. Wix supports this officially through Wix Headless, with a JavaScript SDK and REST APIs covering data, members and subscription payments.
This is the one you want, and it's the whole reason the architecture conversation matters. Your listings, accounts and subscriptions already live in one place, so the app becomes a new face on a backend that already works.
You asked for a number, so here's an honest range rather than a guess dressed up as a quote. A first version covering the traveller side on both iOS and Android, with GPS and nearby recommendations, saved places, itineraries, push notifications, QR scanning and basic offline access: $13,500 to $16,000.
That firms up once the website is live, because by then we'll know which features people actually use. Two practical things to know now. Apple charges $99 a year for a developer account and Google charges $25 once. And apps need periodic maintenance for operating system updates in a way websites simply don't, usually a few hours a couple of times a year.
Don't build the app until the website has proven that businesses will pay and travellers will use it. Not because it's difficult, but because you'd be guessing at which features matter. Six months of real usage will tell you what to build, and it'll probably be a shorter list than either of us would write today.
You asked whether a second location means starting over. It doesn't, and it's worth being specific, because it changes how to think about what you're spending now.
Carries across unchanged: the whole data model, the subscription and tier engine, ranking logic, business dashboard, claim and verification flow, admin console, review system, stats engine and the API layer. That's the majority of the work and the majority of the cost.
New each time: region hierarchy for that country, listing content, the visual skin if you want it distinct, the language mix, local payment considerations, and whatever is genuinely different about how that market works.
Realistically a second country runs at roughly a third to 40% of what the first costs, and goes live in a fraction of the time. The first build carries the engineering. Everything after that is configuration and content.
Three things you said on the call change the scope, so they change the price. To be clear about what's happened, my rate hasn't moved. The amount of work has, because of decisions you made.
| Stage | What changed | Was | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design 2 weeks |
Unchanged. The database design has to be complete either way. | $2,400 | $2,400 |
| Launch ~10 weeks |
You're building the visual mock and supplying artwork and colour direction, which removes the discovery and revision cycles. Your local contacts gather listing content rather than us structuring it from scratch. | $9,600 | $8,400 |
| Scale optional, later |
Listing-level translation drops out. Interface stays four-language, listings stay in the owner's language, fields stay in the database for later. | $7,800 | $6,500 |
| Live and taking subscriptions | Design plus Launch, across four payments over roughly four months | $12,000 | $10,800 |
Design is one payment of $2,400. Launch splits into three payments of $2,800, each released against working software you've seen running. Largest single payment at any point is $2,800. Everything including Scale comes to $17,300.
You mentioned others came in around five thousand, and I'd rather deal with that directly than pretend it wasn't said.
Five thousand builds a directory website. Listings, categories, search, a contact form, and it can look genuinely good. What it doesn't include is the part that makes this a business: a subscription engine with tiers that actually control ranking and features, a dashboard where owners manage their own listings, a claim and verification flow, an admin console you run the whole thing from, per-listing statistics, and a backend structured so the app is a new front end rather than a second build.
If I removed all of that I could reach five thousand too. But then you'd have a website about Costa Rica rather than a platform businesses pay to be on, and the second one is what you described wanting.
The other thing worth weighing is what you told me about expanding into other regions and eventually other countries. That's an argument for spending properly once instead of cheaply twice.
I gave you a muddled answer on this right at the end of the call, so here it is properly.
| Design | Two weeks from the day it starts. Beginning early September puts it finished around the 19th. |
| Build | Mid September through late November. Around ten weeks including buffer. |
| Soft launch | Late November, just ahead of your busy season rather than in the middle of it. Seeding and claiming run through December. |
| First renewals | November the following year, which by your own calendar is the right month for them to land. |
| Scale stage | Spring, once you've seen what December through April actually produced. |
Nothing needs deciding this week. Have a proper read, and if anything here doesn't sit right, or you want to argue with a number, please say so directly. That's a far more useful conversation than agreement.
If you do want to move, the next step is the Design stage. Two weeks, $2,400, one payment, and at the end of it you own a complete architecture document for TreasureMaps, whoever ends up building it. I'd genuinely rather you paid for two weeks of thinking and stayed completely free to walk away than felt locked into a build because of a discount.
And thank you for the note about timing. You offered three or four in the afternoon my time, which puts you at six or seven in the morning, and that seems unfair on you. Six in the evening my time is nine in the morning yours, which works comfortably from my side. Happy to go earlier if you'd rather, just tell me what suits.
Thanks again for Saturday. The correction on the coast was genuinely useful and it's changed how I'm thinking about the launch timing.
Everything technical here comes from Wix's own documentation. Links so you can check any of it yourself.