I built a coverage mapping tool for a tiny, unglamorous niche (wireless ISPs)
A few months ago I started building GridVisio — a browser-based coverage mapping tool for fixed wireless ISPs (WISPs). Not a trendy market, but a real one: small wireless internet providers who plan tower coverage by hand or pay per-export with the one dominant tool in the space.
What it does:
- Plot sector antennas (azimuth, beamwidth, radius)
- Import subscriber lists, auto-classify served/unserved
- Line-of-sight + Fresnel zone checks using real terrain data
- FCC BDC/BEAD compliance exports (US regulatory filings WISPs must submit twice a year)
- An embeddable widget for the WISP's own website — a visitor checks their address, the operator gets a qualified, line-of-sight-validated lead by email
Stack: Laravel 11 + Vue.js 3 + Google Maps, hosted on Hetzner.
Solo build, I'm a PHP developer based in Romania.
Free tier is permanent (1 project, 5 towers, 100 subscribers), paid plans start at $19/mo.
Happy to answer questions about the niche, the stack, or how I'm finding customers in such a specific market — that part has been the hardest part by far.
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Reading this, I found myself less interested in the mapping features and more interested in how you're deciding where to focus.
A niche product can accumulate a lot of valid requests from a small number of users.
Sometimes the difficult part isn't saying yes.
It's figuring out which "yes" actually defines the business.
Well, I try to assess (best I can) if it is a generally useful feature and try to prioritize those (implement the pone with most requests first). If it is a customization that doesn't benefit others, don't implement app-wide but rather find a generic mechanism to apply custom features (I used to do that for other SaaS apps I worked on in the past). So, it's almost never no, but when it is yes, it depends if it is a new app feature or a customization.
That's exactly the distinction I was hoping to understand.
Your reply made me think there's one strategic decision sitting underneath that prioritization approach which becomes much more significant as the product grows, but I don't think I can explain the reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
Looks a good project can you add it to https://dev.us.kg/t/share-tools