About bengaluru.rent

An anonymous, crowdsourced rent map of Bangalore. Real prices from real renters. No brokers. No paywall. Free forever.

Why this exists

Every major rental platform in India — MagicBricks, NoBroker, 99acres, Housing — shows broker-quoted listings. Those prices are almost always inflated. A 1BHK that an existing tenant pays ₹18,000 for might be advertised at ₹26,000 to the next renter. There is no public source of truth for "what does this flat actually cost?"

bengaluru.rent flips that. Real renters drop pins showing what they actually pay. Every neighbour's verified rent becomes the next renter's reference point. No broker layer. No commercial gate. Just transparent data shared by the people who live in the city.

The origin story

In late 2025, a Bangalore tenant signed a ₹12,000/month lease through a broker. Two weeks later, he found out that the previous tenant in the same flat was paying ₹8,500/month — the broker had inflated the asking by 40%. The new tenant had no way to verify what was "normal" for the area, because every available data source was broker-controlled.

That experience triggered the build: a public map where renters share what they pay, anonymously. The first version went live in early 2026. Word-of-mouth carried it from a few dozen pins to several thousand within months.

Where we are today

93K+
unique visitors
4,700+
real rents pinned
3,000+
active flat-hunters
14,000+
matches made
990+
area watchers
₹233 Cr
rent volume mapped

How the platform works

1. Renters share what they pay

Tap the map at your flat's location → enter rent, BHK, furnishing, society (if gated). The data point joins the public map, rounded to ~100m for privacy. Anonymous: no signup, no account, no IP address ever displayed.

2. Owners list flats directly

Same flow, marked as "available to rent." Direct flat-hunters in the area get matched and reach the owner over email. Zero broker fees, zero listing fees, zero commission. The owner's contact is shared only with seekers whose pins actually pass a 2.5 km radius + budget + BHK filter — never displayed publicly.

3. Flat-hunters drop a seeker pin

Tell us your budget, area, preferences (furnishing, food, smoking, parking). A daily AI-powered matching pipeline emails you every flat in your radius that fits — sourced from the rent pins shared by the city's renters and owners. No agents. No middlemen.

The tech (transparency)

bengaluru.rent is built and operated by one person — Harshit Anand — with help from Claude, an AI coding assistant from Anthropic. The matching pipeline, inbox triage, spam detection, and quality audits are all AI-driven. The platform serves 1,000+ personalised emails per day with one human + one AI in the loop.

Stack: a single static HTML page on Netlify, a Supabase Postgres database for the rent pins, and Resend for transactional email. No mobile app. No frameworks. Sometimes the simplest approach is the right one.

How we keep the lights on

Server costs — database, email delivery, hosting — cross ₹4,000/month at our current scale. We don't charge users, don't paywall data, and don't take broker money. The remaining option was Google ads on the page — the same model Wikipedia uses with its donation banners — to fund infrastructure while keeping the data free, anonymous, and broker-free.

If you'd rather see no ads, an ad-blocker (uBlock, AdBlock) works fine. We won't fight it. The site works the same either way.

The mission: make Bangalore rental data as transparent as it should be. Everything else is downstream of that.

Roadmap

Shaped entirely by user feedback. Current priorities:

About the founder

Harshit Anand is a Bangalore-based product builder with a background in consumer technology. He built bengaluru.rent solo, in evenings and weekends, after the broker-vs-tenant experience above.

Reach Harshit on LinkedIn or via the contact page.

Mission, in one line

Make Bangalore rental data as transparent as it should be.