Hey Product Hunt! 👋

I'm Çağın, and together with my wife we built PastPath — because we kept walking right past incredible historical sites without even knowing they were there.

Turkey has thousands of years of history layered into every neighborhood, but there's no good way to discover it while you're actually out exploring. Google Maps tells you where restaurants are — PastPath tells you where a 2,000-year-old Roman road is hiding behind that restaurant.

We're a husband-and-wife team from Turkey, and we built this entire platform together from the ground up. We tackled everything side-by-side—from the engineering (mobile, backend, and web) to the product vision, design, and content curation. Every single location in the app has been hand-researched and verified by the two of us.

Here's what makes PastPath different:

🗺️ 1,200+ curated locations — historical sites, hidden restaurants, nature spots, and boutique hotels across Turkey, all plotted on an interactive map.

🔔 Smart trip tracking — Start a trip and PastPath uses a 3-layer system (geofencing + background location + GPS confirmation) to detect when you're lingering near a historical place. It sends you a notification: "You've been here a while — want to add this to your route?" No constant GPS drain.

🛤️ Build & share routes — Create travel routes as drafts, optimize stop order automatically (traveling salesman algorithm!), then publish and share them with the community.

📸 Instagram story generator — Share your route as a beautiful story card directly to Instagram.

🧠 Daily history quiz — 7 questions a day covering history, food, and nature. Compete on weekly leaderboards with other explorers.

The full tech stack (for the curious):

Mobile: React Native / Expo — iOS + Android (34K lines)
Backend: Spring Boot (Java) + PostgreSQL — 128 REST endpoints, 17 entities, JWT auth, rate limiting (16K lines)
Web: Next.js — full web app with map, routes, profiles, admin panel (15K lines)
Infra: GraphHopper for route optimization, Firebase for push notifications, Cloudflare for image CDN, Flyway for DB migrations
Admin: 19-page admin dashboard for managing places, routes, users, quizzes, submissions & notifications
Turkish & English i18n across all platforms

65,000+ lines of code across 3 platforms, 128 API endpoints, a 19-page admin panel, 17 database entities — built by a two-person team with zero funding. It's been a wild ride getting through both App Store and Play Store reviews together 😅

PastPath is free with ads. No premium paywall.

We'd love to hear your feedback — especially if you've traveled (or plan to travel) in Turkey. And if you know of a historical spot we're missing, you can suggest new places directly in the app!

Thanks for checking it out 🙏