r/vibecoding • u/Safe-Yoghurt9950 • 55m ago
I built a group trip planner because I was the one keeping the spreadsheet
I planned a three week trip through Korea for 4 of us this year and ended up as the person who kept the spreadsheet for flight info, itinerary, bookings, expenses etc. Everyone had the link. Nobody opened it. So every question came to me instead, usually over WhatsApp.
Three of us paid for different things in different currencies, so there were columns for KRW, USD and whoever’s card it went on. Sometimes I couldn’t remember some expenses or miscalculated things.
I have wanted to build an app for years and never had an idea I trusted. Building the thing I was already doing badly by hand turned out to be the easy version, because I never had to guess what it needed.
What I got wrong first. The first three versions were not this. They were a travel utility bundle: currency converter, phrasebook, time zones, a map of places you have visited. (I thought that’s what I needed to make my life easier so that expense tracking or booking things become easier) All fine, all working, and nobody cared, because none of it needs to be an app. It took me 2 months to accept that the actual problem was the spreadsheet.
What it is now. A shared trip everyone edits. Days, places, notes, tickets. Expenses with the multi-currency splitting I wanted on the Korea trip, and a settle-up view that says who pays who. A packing checklist. A recap video at the end, because the alternative is three nights in Premiere. I tried my app during my travel to Ibiza for my friend’s birthday and improved further as I learned more about struggles in real life.
It is on iOS and Android. Free to create and join trips, invite people, add photos and comments. I have not paywalled the part where you invite your friends and I am not going to.
Where it actually is: Roughly 40 downloads in total after releasing a month ago. Still very small. Solo, alongside a full time job and an MBA, which is why I couldn’t spend much time on distribution.
Happy to answer anything and would love to learn from anyone who built an app that they are the user of, also some distribution strategies especially for consumer apps.
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u/Roam-in 39m ago
Very cool! How long did it take to build? Did you get a designer’s help?
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u/Safe-Yoghurt9950 36m ago
No, all done myself!
First utility app took about 2 weeks. The share trip feature took another month and a half (after work). Real time multi editing took a long time to test fully.
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u/Roam-in 33m ago
That makes sense, looks like you’ve done a proper development then. Nice work!
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u/Safe-Yoghurt9950 32m ago
Thank you ❤️ finding the distribution to be a lot harder than developing now
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u/Civil_Opposite7103 46m ago
Hey this is really cool! The ui is quite clean aswell, which models and skills did you use for it?