Dan-Lucian Ștefancu

I run a few apartments in Timișoara, and I wanted to know where my listings appeared when someone searched the city. People kept recommending Rankbreeze. At $29 a month, it seemed expensive for what I needed, but I tried it. The rankings didn’t match what I was seeing, so I started checking for myself. I searched the same city with the same dates through proxies in different countries. My listing was on page 1 from Romania, page 3 from Germany and page 2 from the UK. That helped explain the difference. A ranking needed some context, especially where the search was coming from. I hadn’t seen anyone explain that clearly to hosts. I started building tauRank because I wanted to keep track of those differences without checking everything by hand. I spent quite a while on the spec before writing any code. It’s just me working on it, and I wanted to be clear about what I was building. Getting the data was the harder part. Airbnb has no public API for this, and its partner program doesn’t provide rankings either. That means crawling through residential proxies and maintaining the crawler as things change. The first version went live in October 2026, covering Romanian cities. It now works with any city. When someone adds the first listing in a city, we start tracking it there. I still manage my own apartments, so a lot of the product comes from things I need myself. When I’m considering a feature, I usually ask whether it would help me make a decision about my own listings.

Dreams & what's next