Case study · Web · Prototype · My own product
A custom application for one person: plan and budget an eight-night trip. It had to be mobile friendly, work with any currency and convert to the traveller’s own, and hold the whole trip — flights, hotel, places, plan, spend — in one place.
Decisions that mattered · 01
- Build for one traveller first. Two roles only — owner and visitor. The owner edits the plan and sees the budget; everyone else reads. That removed accounts, sign-up and most of the security surface from a prototype that needed to exist in weeks.
- Budget tied to the bookings. The flight and hotel choices feed the budget directly, so “what’s left” is real from the first screen, and every expense logged during the trip is subtracted from it.
- Any currency, shown in yours. Expenses are entered in the currency you paid in and converted to your home currency — AUD and THB for this trip — with a toggle to see either.
- Places straight onto the calendar. Every place card has an add-to-plan button that drops it into a morning, afternoon or evening slot on the eight-day planner, with list and day views.
- No build step, no framework. Static HTML, vanilla JS and a few PHP endpoints storing JSON on disk. Fast to change, trivial to deploy.
Stack
HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript on the front end; PHP sessions and JSON files on a shared host for the owner-only writes. Leaflet for the route map, Chart.js for price comparisons, Tabler Icons. GitHub Actions deploy.
Outcome
Live at verbum.one/pattaya2026 as a working prototype. A general web app is next, then a native iOS app.
Screens · 02
