Guidera

Last year I was planning a two-week trip and realized I had:

- The itinerary in Google Docs

- Hotel confirmations buried in three separate emails

- A packing list in Notes that I never finished

- A budget spreadsheet I stopped updating by day 4

- No idea what the actual customs/etiquette norms were until I'd already made a small mistake in front of someone

None of these tools talked to each other. My travel buddy had a different version of the itinerary. Syncing plans over a group chat was its own special kind of nightmare. And the "AI trip planner" apps I tried were either a single chatbot with no memory of my actual trip, or a booking engine wearing an AI mask.

So over the last several months I built Guidera -- an AI-assisted travel companion, not a booking site -- and it went live on the App Store this week.

What it actually does

The core idea is "Smart Plan": you give Guidera your destination, dates, budget, and preferences, and it generates a full draft -- itinerary, packing list, safety briefing, customs/etiquette notes, and key documents -- in one shot. You can then edit, regenerate sections, or ask the AI chat assistant to adjust anything ("push day 3 later, I want to sleep in").

A few features I'm especially proud of, because they came directly from my own trip failures:

- AI Vision -- point your camera at a menu, a sign, or a landmark and get instant translation and context. This alone would've saved me from ordering something I couldn't identify in three different countries.

- Destination safety context -- informational safety zones, scam awareness for your specific destination, and a one-tap SOS / emergency contacts screen.

- Customs & etiquette briefings -- dress code, tipping norms, do's and don'ts per country, generated ahead of time instead of learned the hard way.

- Trip import via camera OCR -- scan a boarding pass or forward a booking email and it gets added to your trip automatically instead of retyped.

- Travel comparison, not booking -- Guidera surfaces flights/stays/cars/experiences from multiple providers side by side, then sends you to the actual provider to complete the purchase. I didn't want to become another booking engine with markup and lock-in.

- Community -- groups, buddy matching, and local guides for people who want to coordinate with other travelers or find people who've actually been where they're going.

Stack, for the curious

React Native / Expo for the app, Clerk for auth, Supabase for the backend, Claude/Gemini/Grok powering different parts of the AI layer (trip planning, vision, chat), RevenueCat for subscriptions.

Business model

Free tier: 1 active trip, a handful of lifetime AI credits, core safety tools. Guidera Pro (single tier, four billing durations) unlocks unlimited trips, full AI access, trip collaboration, and expense tracking with receipt scanning. Apple handles billing.

What I'm looking for feedback on

1. Does the Smart Plan output feel useful on the first try, or does it need more back-and-forth than it should?

2. Is the safety information framing clear that it's informational context, not a monitoring/alert service?

3. What's missing for the way you actually plan trips -- solo, family, group?

I'm a solo/small-team founder (Nidrosoft, San Diego) building this because I wanted it to exist, and I'd rather hear the honest "this part is confusing" now than after I've built five more features on top of it.

iOS only for now -- Android is on the roadmap depending on how this goes.

Site: guidera.one

Happy to answer anything about the build, the AI integration choices, or why I didn't just build "another ChatGPT wrapper."