A bachelorette weekend in Cabo has a flight from Dallas, two from Chicago, one from JFK, a connection through LAX, a welcome dinner at 7pm Friday, a brunch reservation at 11am Sunday, and one rental SUV that someone needs to pick up at the airport. That's twenty-three moving pieces, distributed across nine people, in a single group chat that nobody can scroll back to.
One person — usually the bride's sister, or the friend who sent the first invite — becomes the human refresh button. They answer "what time is dinner again?" four times. They check FlightAware for someone else's delay. They re-paste the address. They send the link to the spreadsheet, which then gets edited, which then nobody reads. By Saturday morning they've been the trip's group-chat helpdesk for six weeks and the trip hasn't even started.
Vrolu is the dashboard that human gets to stop being.
The rule that picks the fights
Inside the codebase there's a phrase that decides every close call: trip day is sacred. It means the dashboard has to be correct on the day people are actually traveling — not "mostly correct," not "accurate for most users," not "good enough to fix later." If a flight is in the air, the time on the card is the airport-local time, not a stale UTC. If a flight gets delayed forty minutes, the dashboard knows before the gate agent finishes the PA. If the timezone math is ambiguous, we don't guess.
That rule kills a lot of shortcuts. We don't ship the easy spreadsheet view that's wrong for international travel. We don't trust polling when we can subscribe to flight webhooks. We don't fall back to the browser's local time when the trip's destination is in a different zone. It's a slower product to build. It's the only one worth shipping.
One time, the whole weekend
One organizer pays once to publish a trip. $19.99 for the first 100 trips during the launch promo, $24.99 after that. That's it. No subscription, no per-traveler upcharge, no monthly fee that shows up after the trip is over. Travelers open the link from the group chat, sign in with their email (one tap, no separate signup), and see the same plan you see. The sign-in keeps the trip's flight numbers and stay details private to the people you invited — not on the open internet for anyone who guesses the URL. They opt in to email updates if they want them. They opt out with one tap.
The reason it's flat-priced: coordinating a weekend shouldn't feel like a SaaS contract. You pay once for the thing that makes the weekend easier, then the price gets out of the way.
What's in v1
Live flight tracking through FlightAware's AeroAPI. A shared itinerary with timezone-correct event times. A public dashboard travelers reach by URL. Email reminders you can wire to any event. A clean light/dark UI that works on phones first because that's where the group chat lives. Stripe checkout for the publish step. That's the whole launch surface — small on purpose.
What we're not building yet
Expense splitting. In-app chat. A second-org tier with shared trips. iOS and Android apps. Each of those is a real feature for some user; none of them is what makes a Friday-to-Sunday weekend less stressful, so they wait until the core dashboard is something people use and love. (A native iPhone app is the first v1.5 priority once the web product is proven.)
— the human at hello@vrolu.com