The Crawfish App provides easy way to check vendor prices

BATON ROUGE, LA (WAFB) - For many, the end of Carnival season marks the start of another beloved time of the year in Louisiana: crawfish season. However, getting those tasty crustaceans from the mud to your plate usually requires a few phone calls to the many local vendors in search of the right price for your needs.

"Often times, we'd call for maybe an hour trying to find crawfish, trying to find the cheapest price if we were throwing a big crawfish boil," said Baton Rouge native, Ryan King. "At some point, my wife and I were just driving around and we said, 'We need to make an app for that.' So we did."

Baton Rouge couple and crawfish enthusiasts, Ryan and Laney King, developed The Crawfish App. The app has a growing list of 500 vendors throughout Louisiana and Texas that shows the weekly price for boiled and live crawfish. Users can search based on price, location, or even user reviews. There's also a vendor submission button so users can add vendors to the list.

Within its first three weeks, more than 13,000 users downloaded the app. To keep prices up to date, the couple and a few friends spend about three hours every Thursday calling vendors for their latest prices.

"I'm going to be calling most of these vendors anyway on a weekend, so all I'm doing is taking the work from the users," said King.

The app is free for users and vendors. The Kings hope they can eventually sell advertisements on the app, but for now, it's all a labor of love for the food the couple loves.

"There's nowhere else that has the culture of Louisiana. For us, it's about celebrating the culture. With that comes crawfish season, which is the best season," said Laney King.

Full disclosure, Laney King also works as a sales executive for WAFB 9News. However, 9News is not in any way involved in The Crawfish App.

To download the app for iPhone, click here. To download the app for Android, click here.

Copyright 2017 WAFB. All rights reserved.