Spotfic VS ViewForge

Spotfic's answer

I'm a solo founder from India. I watched first-time business owners around me make their biggest financial decision, signing a multi-year commercial lease, on gut feel and a broker's word, because proper site-selection analysis costs lakhs and takes weeks. Choosing the wrong location kills more small businesses than bad food or bad service ever will. I built Spotfic to make the analysis a consultant would charge thousands for available in 60 seconds, for the price of a dinner. And to be honest enough to tell you when a location is a bad idea.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

Spotfic's answer

React and Vite on the front end, Supabase (Postgres) for data and auth, Vercel serverless functions with a background worker for report generation, Google Places API for live competitor and location data, Anthropic Claude for the analysis engine, and Chart.js for report visualizations. Mobile apps are built with Capacitor.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import

Spotfic's answer

Most location tools either cost five figures a year (enterprise platforms like Placer.ai) or give you generic AI text with no real data behind it. Spotfic sits in neither camp. Every report combines live Google Maps competitor data (real businesses, ratings, review counts, distances) with AI analysis, and clearly labels which insights are hard data and which are estimates, each with a confidence level. And it's honest: the score is 0 to 10 and it will tell you NO. We recently scored one of Bengaluru's most famous cafe streets 4/10 because 18 competitors sit within 1 km. A tool that only says "great location!" isn't analysis, it's flattery.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

Spotfic's answer

Three reasons. Price model: pay-as-you-go from $9 for reports, no subscription, and credits never expire, while enterprise alternatives start at thousands per year. Coverage: it works worldwide, anywhere Google Maps covers, with dedicated demographic pipelines for India, the US, UK, Canada and Australia. India especially is a market no enterprise location-intelligence tool serves. Speed and completeness: one address in, a 14-section report out in about 60 seconds, covering competitors, foot traffic, demographics, rent benchmark, SWOT, financial outlook and a 90-day launch plan, exportable as a PDF.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

Spotfic's answer

People about to sign a commercial lease: first-time founders opening a restaurant, cafe, gym, salon, clinic or store; franchise owners and expansion teams comparing candidate territories; and commercial real-estate advisors and franchise consultants who want data-backed site recommendations for their clients.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

Spotfic's answer

We're early-stage and don't publish customer names yet. Our users are small business owners, franchise operators and commercial real-estate advisors across India, the US and beyond.