About

Built in Tampa, for Tampa.

Locals Club is a Hellion Studios product. We're a small team building software for people who actually care about the neighborhoods they live in.

Why we're building this

Groupon-style deal aggregators trained a whole generation of consumers to treat discounts like a bidding war, and trained small businesses to associate "marketing" with slashing their margins to draw in one-time bargain hunters.

That's bad for both sides. Indie owners run promotions that fill seats on a Tuesday but leave them with nothing on Saturday. Locals redeem coupons at places they'll never revisit. Nobody wins in the long term.

Locals Club is what we think a modern local-deals app should look like: verified residents, direct POS integration, a commission model that only charges merchants when someone actually shows up, and no advertising.

What we believe

  • Real locals matter.Verification isn't about surveillance — it's about making sure the offers on the platform can actually be worth running.
  • Indie owners aren't a marketing budget. Our pricing is designed so a coffee shop with a 20% margin can still make money on every redemption.
  • Software should get out of the way.If an offer takes more than a minute to publish, we've failed.
  • Data is not a product.We don't sell it. We don't rent it. We don't "partner" with data brokers.

The team

Locals Club is built and operated by Hellion Studios, LLC — a small, independent software studio in Tampa. If you want to chat, email tyson@hellionstudios.com.

How to help