Caravan

The challenge

Group road trips fall apart in the coordination, not the destination: five people leaving from five different cities, a shared spreadsheet for expenses nobody updates, and a group chat that can't show you where anyone actually is.

The product bet behind Caravan was that a single app — live map, shared planning, and expense splitting in one place — could replace that whole stack of spreadsheets, chat threads, and guesswork.

Our approach

We built the backend and app in parallel — Flutter with Riverpod on the client, Express, Prisma, Redis, and Socket.IO on the server — so live features like the map and chat were real from the first internal build, not bolted on after.

A deliberate engineering principle ran through the whole build: no screen fakes a number it can't back up. Where a feature isn't fully wired yet — like in-app payments — the UI says so honestly instead of pretending.

What we built

Fifteen feature areas across the app: trip creation and planning with collaborative stop-picking, a live map showing everyone's location converging on the destination, an AI trip copilot for finding stops and adjusting schedules, and 'Convoy Talk' for on-the-road group callouts.

The expense-splitting ledger computes a real, debt-minimized settle-up on the server — not a spreadsheet formula copied into the app. And a shared 'Memories' timeline turns the trip's photos into a recap once everyone's home.