About HartaFarmacii — a personal project, transparent to the bone.

01 Why this project exists

The project started from a simple frustration: in Romania there is no single place where you can quickly compare the price of the same OTC drug across the major chains and find the closest 24/7 pharmacy at the same time. Each chain's app is an island (its own catalogue), and Google Maps doesn't tell you whether a pharmacy is actually open at 02:30 in an unfamiliar neighbourhood.

HartaFarmacii answers the question: „how much does X cost in my city, and where is the closest open pharmacy right now?". It is a sister project to pretcarburant.ro — same recipe (public data + a fast UI), different vertical.

02 What we offer concretely

• An interactive map with over 3,900 pharmacies nationwide, filterable by chain, county, city, and 24/7 status.
• A price comparator for OTC, supplements and dermocosmetics across Catena, Dr. Max, Farmacia Tei, Help Net, Dona, Mattca, Spring Farma, and other online pharmacies.
• CANAMED references — the legal maximum retail price approved by the Ministry of Health for prescription drugs (used as a benchmark, not a sale price).
• Dedicated pages per county, city and chain, with 24/7 pharmacy lists.
• A native iOS app with offline-friendly map, search, and admin announcements.

03 What we are not

Radical honesty — it's easier to spell out what we don't do than what we do.

• We don't sell medication. No checkout, no cart, no payments. To buy, go to the pharmacy's official site or visit the physical location.
• We're not affiliated with any chain. No commission on sales, no priority-listing contracts, no „sponsored listings". Display order comes from proximity or price, not from who pays.
• We don't give medical advice. Editorial content (guides, symptoms, glossary) is informational — synthesised from public sources (ANMDMR, EMA, official patient information leaflets). For any health concern, talk to a doctor or pharmacist.
• We don't process prescriptions. No e-prescription brokering, no doctor notifications, no reimbursement calculations. Reimbursed drug prices depend on patient and prescription and are not fixed public prices — see the methodology page.
• We don't sell data. No data shop, no paid API, no monetisation deals around visitors.

04 Team and credentials

HartaFarmacii is built, maintained, and edited by Andrei-Șerban, a software developer based in Romania. To be clear up front: I am not a doctor, not a pharmacist, and have no formal medical training. I am a developer who curates public data and builds tools so that already-existing information becomes easier to access.

All editorial content (patient guides, symptom and condition pages) is synthesised from explicitly cited public sources — the ANMDMR website, EMA, officially approved patient leaflets, guidelines published by medical societies. They are not personal opinions and they do not replace clinical consultation. See the editorial team page for details.

05 Data sources and methodology

Pharmacy locations come from OpenStreetMap (ODbL licence), queried via the Overpass API and supplemented with the chains' public store-locators. Prices are extracted from the public websites of online pharmacies (mostly from JSON-LD schema.org/Product), and Rx benchmarks come from the CANAMED list published by the Ministry of Health.

Refresh cadence varies: locations refresh daily, prices daily or weekly depending on the chain. A full description of how we collect, verify and refresh data — including the limitations we declare openly — is on the methodology page.

06 How the project pays for itself

HartaFarmacii is free for users and won't become a paywall. The business model is simple and transparent:

• Ads via Google AdSense (web) and Google AdMob (iOS) — shown only after explicit consent at the cookie banner (Consent Mode v2, GDPR).
• iOS „Premium Lifetime" In-App Purchase at 4.99 RON — a single one-off payment, no auto-renewal — disables ads for users who prefer a clean experience.
• No aggressive tracking: no cross-site fingerprinting, no data sales, no third-party trackers beyond GA4 and AdSense (both gated on explicit consent).

Hosting runs on Hetzner Cloud (servers in Germany and Romania, EU — data stays under GDPR jurisdiction). The iOS code, the scrapers and the Flask backend are written and maintained personally, without freelancers.

07 Editorial independence

There is no conflict of interest. We are not affiliated with any pharmacy chain, drug manufacturer, or medical organisation. Revenue comes 100% from contextual ads (AdSense/AdMob) and the iOS IAP — none of those sources conditions display order or guide content.

If you spot a perceived conflict or an error, email contact@hartafarmacii.ro — we correct within 7 days, or we explain why we won't.