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Yelp Clone – Cost to Make a Website Like Yelp

Yelp TemplateGeoPlaces by Tempatic

Building your own Yelp Clone city reviews website with geo targeting will cost less than $200 and you don’t have to know any HTML.  Install a premium Wordpress theme called “Geo Places”.    Below I’ve listed the costs you will incur. Click here for details.  Use this Wordpress template to create your own:

GeoPlaces Wordpress Theme
Yelp Clone Features Include:

  • Google maps with Geotagging, Geo Targeting
  • Users able to add reviews, ratings and comments.
  • Detail listing page showing contact, address, description, images, other businesses in the area
  • Users able to add own listings (free/paid)
  • frontpage slider can display Google maps or images.
  • Display featured events or main attractions.
  • GD Star Ratings and Reviews

Click here to demo the Template

Click here to download the Template

Cost to Create a Yelp Website

1.  $56/year for Webhosting. You need to purchase a domain name and webhosting before you start.  I recommend Fatcow.com because if you purchase web hosting from them, they give you a free domain name, unlimited disk space, unlimited email accounts, unlimited MYSQL databases, 24×7 support, and much more.  The $56 includes their current 40% promo, I don’t know how long this deal will last.  Click here to check it out.

2.  $0 for Wordpress. WordPress is completely free.  It’s open source and you can play around or download wordpress from wordpress.org.

3. $89.95 for Wordpress Theme. This is a one time fee to purchase the premium GeoPlaces template.   Afterwards it is completely yours and there is no extra fee you need to pay to use it.  After you upload and activate the template on your wordpress site, it is a fully functional Citysearch, Yelp or Restaurant Review website.   This is the perfect Restaurant Review Template as well.  Check here for a demo/download the template.

4. -$150 Advertising Credits. If you purchase your webhosting through Fatcow.com you will get $150 in advertising credits.   Fatcow.com gives you $75 in Google Adwords credits, $50 in Facebook ads credits, $25 in Yahoo/Bing advertising credits and it’s free to list your business on YP.com (Yellowpages).

So that’s it.  If you add in all the costs (Webhosting + WordPress + Wordpress Theme) it totals $145.95.  Please keep in mind that the prices are subject to change, especially the webhosting because it’s currently on sale right now.   If you add in the advertising credits Fatcow.com gives you, you actually (Total cost + advertising credits) pay nothing to get your Yelp website started.  This is the perfect Wordpress Theme to build a website like Yelp, website like Citysearch, or any product/service review websites like Cnet.com or TripAdvisor.com.

Thanks,

Elaine

17 thoughts on “Yelp Clone – Cost to Make a Website Like Yelp

  1. Elaine,

    This might be a completely crazy question. Is it possible to install a wordpress plugin on joomla that would allow you to use all of the Geo Places features? I know you can’t run the two side by side, but as a subdomain? Then, you could have the best of both worlds.

    Thanks for your feedback. Great article!
    Larkin

    1. Hi Larkin,
      Yes. You can install WordPress in subdirectory of your public_html and configure a subdomain to point to it. Upload and activate the Yelp theme from your new WordPress installation. But I don’t think there is a WordPress plugin to install on Joomla to utilize all of Geoplaces features.
      Hope that helps. Thanks for your visit!
      Elaine

  2. Thanks for this great articles. very helpful.

    I am looking for yelp like development but have no technical knowledge.
    Can any one recommend programers who help to customize some of the product
    mentioned here?

  3. Hi, i came across your site while searching for Yelp-like websites. Thank you for this very informative article. I know nothing about the technical aspect and I intend to hire someone who can help build the site. But my question is: will this work overseas? Yelp in an Asian country using this theme? Thanks.

    1. Hi Karen,
      Sorry for the late response. The Yelp template should work in any country. They provide you with tutorials on how to change the language of your theme. Any pre-sales questions you should contact Templatic support. They should be able to answer your questions better.
      Thanks,
      Elaine

  4. i have seen some bad comments about geoplaces that say it doesn’t search as it should, and that the support is really bad. do you know anything about this? do you have any examples of sites that use it successfully?
    thanks,

    wendy

    1. Hi Wendy,
      I haven’t heard any bad comments about GeoPlaces yet. I recommend this template because the the template functionality seems to cover a lot of features of a review site. They are coming out with GeoPlaces 4 which should resolve a number of bugs. If you or anyone reading this comment wants to give a review of how the product actually works, I would greatly appreciate it. Also you can test the functionality of GeoPlaces at the Templatic website via their “test drive”. It gives you admin access to all their templates and you can choose to install any template to try it out. Let me know what you find! I will be happy to hear from you again.
      Thanks for your visit,
      elaine

  5. For all of you, if you quickly read about tyhis theme on the web, you will notice that never anyone without programming skills ever managed to go live with a GeoPlaces powered site.

    This because it’s never been totally debugged.

    I had bought it in february and since I tried to finish at least one site, but no luck.

    Now I just bought GeoTheme, which very similar to GeoPlaces, but works fine and add many nice extra features…. My site went live after 4 hours from buying this new theme and I suggest you to have a look at it.

  6. hi, thanks for the post. do you know when v4 is out? I am interested in geoplace, but worried that after I get v3, I can’t upgrade to v4 later or have to pay more for upgrades.

    maybe i should wait.

  7. I install in on my domain .. all version V3 and v4 beta have many bugs and site dont work 100%
    Templatic coders are worst i have ever seen

    1. Hi,
      Thanks for your comments. I’m sorry you had such a bad experience. There is another theme called GeoTheme which is a spinoff from GeoPlaces. I’ve heard it’s a better theme to use to create a website like Yelp etc.
      If you want, my post is here about GeoTheme.
      Thanks for your visit,
      elaine

  8. I just contacted FatCow, and they advised me to “social networking sites” are not allowed to be hosted on their servers. I guess Yelp would fall under that category (as that was what I mentioned to them when inquiring about their services). Seems like a site more like arvixe.com would be more a better host for this type of site 🙂 Please let me know your thoughts on this.

    Alex

  9. Elaine I read your article on a Yelp clone and hope you can help me. I have an existing blog whose theme is Striking by Themeforest and I would like to add a review and grade feature to the site where contractors could review and grade any entity they do business with. To also contain a section where events could be listed. It is my plan to get this up and running for free for at least a year before I think about a revenue stream. At that time I will be looking to add another feature which would be for buying and selling surplus material, equipment and tools. Will it be possible to include these two new themes as subthemes or child themes to my existing theme? If not what would fit the bill. Could you give me a quote on building the review and grade theme so it would fit the needs of my audience and then installing it on my site so it did not affect the existing theme. If you think there is a better way can you give guidence and a quote on what it would cost to make it all happen. Thank. Ron

  10. Hi Elaine,

    I am interested in both the GeoPlaces and the GeoThemes templates but have a question that you or someone familiar with the templates can, hopefully, answer.

    When registered user logs in to add a new place…lets say I have a site in search of the best burger in the country….and a registered user has just had a great double cheese burger in the middle of nowhere and wants to add the out of the way diner to the site’s database can the new city be added and be searchable toi subsequent visitors?

    I have only played around with the demo site and it seemed like the only way to add a city would be from the backend, meaning users could add places as long as they were adding places in cities that the admin had previously defined.

    If San Francisco was the only city defined, that great double cheese in the middle of nowhere, despite being in the database, would not searchable…at least by city.

    Am I looking at that wrong?

    Chris

    1. Hi Longswim,
      I believe users can still add their business to your website but not be searchable by city. I think it’s best to confirm with geotheme support. They can better answer your questions.
      Thanks for your visit,
      elaine

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