Visabug

Hey all! I'm Tilo and I made Visabug. Thanks for hunting this, @chrismessina! Before I start, I have to say -- please don't use Visabug at this time to travel. With COVID-19, I think it's very important that people stay in their home countries to flatten the curve. I was actually planning on launching later, but it got hunted a little earlier than I expected. However, I built Visabug before this pandemic was upon us, and I can share some insight into why I built it: ## What is Visabug? Visabug is a website to help users find places that you can travel with your passport. I'm a pretty avid traveller and this tool helps me find new and interesting places. ## What makes this product unique? In addition to telling you visa requirements of different countries, I also collect data on individual countries and cities. For example, I collect: - Cost of hotels and dinners - Is the place warm, cold, rainy, etc. - Estimate of flight prices to major cities - Various tags about popular cities (touristy, LGBT friendly, avg. wifi speeds, good for hiking, proximity to beaches, etc.) - Popular tourist attractions (from Lonely Planet) - Plug types - Tipping culture, available ride-sharing services, plug points, etc. What this means is you can make queries like "show me places that I can travel to without a visa that are warm, has a beach and good wifi". This is very useful! ## How did I build this? It's built using NextJS and React. I have a bunch of cron jobs which scour the internet to find data, scrape it, and store it in a database. Places include: - Wikipedia - Google Search Cards - SmartTraveller - Canada.gov - Lonely Planet - Various other smaller sites Then I have a bunch of NodeJS scripts that analyze this data, constructs JSON from it, and runs some AI on it to generate tags. These tags are used in the filters on the site. Everyday, there are over 1M+ datapoints analyzed by my scripts. A new version of the site is generated and deployed every day. It is deployed on Heroku. ## Why did I build this? Apart from scratching my own itch, I believe a site like this should remain free so that it can help people travel more. I think traveling opens people's eyes to other cultures and makes us realize we are all similar. I have a full-time job so I have no interest in monetizing this too much. But if you are interested in following along with product development, you can follow me on Twitter @tilomitra or on here.

I like the immense amount of data on Visabug. Especially it being so well organized and the COVID-19 seems super relevant. Well done