How I Built a Childcare Availability Platform for 38,000 French Nurseries

Finding childcare in France is famously difficult: 230,000 spots are missing nationwide, and the search process involves calls to mairies, waiting lists at crèches associatives, and forms sent by post to CAF. I built a platform to fix this — here is the technical story.

The Data Problem: 18 Different Source Formats

French childcare data comes from multiple public sources, each with its own format and update frequency:

Source Format Update Scope

CAF (data.gouv.fr) CSV Monthly Agrément PMI + PSU subvention

Mairie databases No API Variable Municipal crèches

DREES SSAM Excel Annually Capacity statistics

Monenfant.fr (CNAF) HTML Daily Limited fields

The strategy: use the CAF CSV as the authoritative registry (38,427 établissements in the 2025 edition), then enrich with GPS coordinates from the government Base Adresse Nationale (BAN API), and supplement with phone/email via SIREN lookup on api.insee.fr.

Geocoding at Scale

The CAF…