Tripmates

Every group trip you try to plan with friends gets killed by excuses — mismatched leaves, mismatched budgets, mismatched commitment. Solo travellers who want company end up either traveling alone or coordinating with strangers on noisy WhatsApp groups with no accountability.

Tripmates is built around one observation: the coordination loop is the bottleneck, not the desire. Remove the loop and the trip happens.

A curated catalogue of trips that already have fixed dates, pre-booked hotels, and a verified host. You browse, you book a seat, you go. No planning, no chasing, no convincing.

The current build is frontend-complete: a homepage that pitches the value (travel together, make friends, save ~30%), a trip listings grid with day-by-day itineraries, host-verification and trust-and-safety pages, and a seat-based booking flow that drops users into a WhatsApp group on confirmation.

Deliberately no database, no real payments — yet. The hardest questions for a marketplace like this aren't technical: they're whether real users trust a stranger-host enough to wire money, whether per-seat pricing reads as fair, and whether the WhatsApp handoff feels safe.

By keeping the prototype backend-light, I can iterate on those flows with real users in days, not sprints. Phase 1 wires up Clerk for auth, Neon Postgres for trip data, and Razorpay for payments only once the trust and pricing flows are validated.

Next.js 16 with the App Router, Server Components, and Turbopack. TypeScript in strict mode. Tailwind v4 with a shadcn/ui Nova preset for a consistent design system. The catalogue is statically generated where possible so listing pages stay sub-second even on Indian mid-tier devices.