Local Coupons, a Bend-based startup, launches across Central Oregon next month. The free mobile app puts offers from nearby businesses on a shopper’s phone, redeemable in person, online, or over the phone. Businesses pay one flat monthly fee. The company is signing on local businesses now, ahead of launch.
Central Oregon has no dedicated digital platform for local offers. When tourist traffic thins out after Labor Day, local customers carry the season for the region’s restaurants, shops and service businesses.
Local Coupons is built to bring those customers through the door, with offers across ten categories: food and drink, beauty and spa, health and fitness, home services, auto services, entertainment, family, pets, professional and shopping.
For decades, local business offers arrived by mail in coupon books and inserts. Every piece cost money to print and send, and none of them reported back whether anyone used them. Online retail solved this with the “promo code” concept. Up to 82 percent of shoppers say a digital coupon influences where they choose to shop. Local Coupons moves the offer to the phone, where it updates when the deal changes, sorts by distance, and shows the business whether it was used.
Merchants pay a flat monthly rate for unlimited offers. There are no printing costs, no per-click fees, no commissions and no contracts. A business publishes an offer from its dashboard and it goes live immediately. Instead of impressions, the owner sees results: saves, activations and confirmed redemptions. A second plan tier adds short videos published in the app and connected to the business’s offers.
The app is free. Sign-up is a phone number and a six-digit one time passcode. Shoppers pick their categories and see offers sorted by distance. Hot Weekly Deals ranks offers by what people nearby saved and redeemed that week; no business can pay for a spot on it. Redemption requires nothing from the business.
“I spent years buying ads for local businesses, and I could never tell an owner what the next dollar would get them,” said Clint Libby, founder of Local Coupons. “The coupon has always worked. People act on a real offer from a place they want to try or when they need to spend money to do or fix something. My mom stretched our family’s budget with a pair of scissors and the Sunday paper, and I watched a coupon decide where we ate that week. The paper was always the problem, so we moved the offer from the mailbox to the phone.”
The economics of print have only strengthened that case. A mailed offer rides on fuel, postage, paper, and ink, and all four have climbed steeply over the past five years. Postage alone has been raised repeatedly since 2021. Every one of those increases lands on the local business buying the campaign, and eventually on the customer at checkout. A digital offer carries none of those costs..
Libby lives in Bend, where he built Local Coupons, and has spent his career in marketing and customer acquisition for local businesses. He founded the company after watching what it cost to win one new customer climb every year while results grew harder to predict, and he is launching it in his own town first because the businesses in the app are the ones he and his neighbors are already spending money with every week.
Local Coupons launches in Bend first, followed by Redmond, Sisters, Sunriver, La Pine, Prineville, and Madras.
