Appricio

For years I had the same ritual in every new city: open the usual apps, get fifty pins or a "top 100 things to do," read forty reviews, and still not know where to actually go. Every travel app hands you options. None of them help you choose. I kept waiting for someone to build the opposite. Nobody did, so I built it myself.

Appricio (https://appricio.com, iPhone) reads where you are, the hour, the weather and your taste, and commits to a few picks a local would actually choose, each with a written reason and a Plan B if you have already been. It will tell you to skip the famous thing when the famous thing is not worth it today.

The part builders usually ask about: the AI is deliberately kept small. Ranking is a deterministic TypeScript scoring engine over an editorially scored venue corpus. Never star ratings, never paid placement. The LLM writes exactly two things, the editorial "why" behind each pick and the city guides, and it never picks or orders anything. Every venue photo is machine-verified before it ships. Guest-first, no signup, works offline for cached cities, no ads.

The honest numbers. Building the 50-city catalog (roughly 12,000 venues, every one with editorial and a verified photo) cost about $127 in AI calls. Adding a new city costs $1 to $4. Keeping the whole catalog fresh runs about $760 a year. The business model is a free tier with all 50 cities in full, plus a $29.99/yr subscription for power features, with worldwide coverage joining Plus later this year. Break-even is about 53 subscribers. Current subscribers: zero. I launched quietly on the App Store on August 7 and publicly on Product Hunt on August 19, with no audience and no waitlist, and it went about how you would expect: no rank, a handful of installs, and a very quiet dashboard.

So the real work now is distribution from zero: hand-sent DMs to micro travel creators with named offer codes so I can see per-creator conversion in App Store Connect, founder-story pitches to podcasts and newsletters, and a pipeline that turns the app itself into short per-city demo videos.

Three things I would genuinely value this community's take on: Would you price a consumer travel app annual-only at $29.99, or add monthly? When would you start gating content behind the paywall when the free tier is the growth engine? And what actually got your consumer app its first 100 real users?

Happy to share anything else about the stack, the costs, or what flopped. That is most of it so far.