Preparing your journey.
Tabi was born from a very specific kind of suffering. The kind that happens in a WhatsApp group with 9 people, a shared Google Sheet that only one person updates, and a budget spreadsheet that was accurate for exactly 48 hours before becoming a work of fiction.
The root cause
Group trip planning is organized chaos pretending to be a plan. Nobody is in charge. Everyone assumes someone else is in charge. That someone is crying in a Google Sheet.
A familiar tragedy in four acts.
The Crime
Someone's planning a group trip. They create a WhatsApp group called "GOOAAAA 🏖️🏖️🏖️". That's where the story begins. And ends. And begins again. And never actually resolves.
The group still exists. Nobody's left it. Nobody ever does.
The Spreadsheet Era
One person always one specific person, you know who they are makes a Google Sheet. It has tabs. Multiple tabs. A budget tab, an activities tab, a "misc" tab that becomes 60% of the planning. It's a masterpiece. Nobody updates it except them.
The Sheet is still open in 11 browser tabs across 4 devices.
The Chaos Peaks
Flight links are sent in the WhatsApp group. Then buried under 200 messages of "who's booking?" "I thought you were booking?" "wait what time does the train leave" and a completely unrelated meme someone sent at 2am.
The meme was funny though.
The Reckoning
Trip's over. Someone paid for dinner four times. Someone paid for nothing. The awkward "hey so about the money" message gets drafted, deleted, redrafted, and sent as a voice note instead. It remains unlistened to for six business days.
The voice note was 4 minutes long. For a ₹340 dinner.
The turning point
A hackathon. A deadline. A lot of water. And a decision to design it like it wasn't a hackathon because if you're going to build something, you might as well make it something you'd actually use.
Described honestly, without the startup landing page energy.
Day-by-day planning. Drag to reorder. Everyone can see it. Revolutionary, I know.
RIP the Google SheetEveryone has access to the same plan. No more 'let me send you the updated version'. One central place that everyone can see. Like a Google Doc but for trips and with better vibes.
No more 'Can you resend the link?'Log expenses. Split them. See exactly who owes what. No voice notes. No 'oh I thought you were tracking it'. Just numbers, clean and honest.
Saves friendshipsFlight tickets. Hotel confirmations. That one screenshot with the booking reference you forwarded to yourself at 5am. All in one place, attached to the trip.
Cloudinary doing heavy liftingPacking lists. Pre-trip TODOs. That one task nobody wants to do (exchange currency) sitting there, unchecked, judging everyone.
No one exchanges currency on time. Ever.All your confirmation numbers in one place. Reference IDs. Booking links. The stuff you're going to need at the airport at 4am when your brain has fully given up.
JetBrains Mono for the ref IDs because it feels rightBy the numbers (loosely)
WhatsApp groups made obsolete
1 per trip
Google Sheets retired with dignity
countless
Awkward money voice notes sent
hopefully 0
The name means
journey (Japanese: 旅)
Built during
a hackathon, with water
Designed like
it wasn't a hackathon
旅 (tabi) means journey in Japanese. Not travel as in booking.com. Journey as in the experience, the whole arc of it. The before, the messy middle, the stories you tell afterward.
The name is Japanese. The product isn't Japan-specific. It's just a word that carries more weight than its four letters suggest. "Journey" in English sounds like a LinkedIn post. "旅" sounds like something worth protecting.
Also it looks great in a neobrutalist card with a thick border and an offset shadow. That was a factor.
tabi
journey · trip · travel
Japanese
The real MVPs
Building something alone means you lose perspective fast. Every bug that didn't reach you was caught by these five. Voluntarily. That's friendship.
Dipali Sharma
@Dipali2Sharma
Nausheen Faiyaz
@codeXninjaDev
Mohit Kumar
@Mohitvermacode7
Pritam Mandal
@rick_jsx
Shyamendra Hazra
@ShyamHz
Broke things early so no one else had to. Thank you.
Your journey,
together.
Not the chaos. Not the spreadsheet. Not the 4-minute voice note about a ₹340 dinner. The actual trip planned, organized, and survived together.