Been There Done That is a travel recommendation app that shows you one thing only: what your actual friends wrote. No reviews from strangers, no ratings, and no algorithm deciding what rises to the top. A circle of friends, and the places they genuinely loved.
The problem it solves
When planning a trip, the first thing everyone does is ask friends. The answers arrive in private messages and group chats, and that is where they vanish: nobody finds them two days later, and a year on, when someone else flies to the same place, the recommendation is buried under a thousand messages. This app turns exactly that into a product.
How it works
- Private circles: open a circle of real friends, the poker crew, work, family, and invite people personally. No user search, no friend suggestions, no friends-of-friends.
- Postcards: every recommendation is a short postcard: a place, a category, and one sentence explaining why. A restaurant, a guesthouse, a zipline, a tip that is in no guidebook.
- Search by destination: before a trip, search the destination and see everything your friends wrote about it, on one map and in numbered cards.
- A private bank: a postcard can be saved without sending it to any circle. That is your own tip bank, visible only to you.
What you will never find here
No ratings and no stars. No comments, likes, points or leaderboards. No ads and nothing sponsored. No in-app chat and no phone numbers anywhere. Each of these was considered and rejected, because each one turns people into writers chasing a score instead of helping a friend.
A boundary enforced in the database
Content in a circle is visible only to that circle, and the rule is enforced by the database permission layer rather than by app code. The difference matters: an app can be taken apart and a screen can be bypassed, but a query arriving at the server simply does not receive rows that do not belong to whoever asked. An automated test suite covers it after every schema change, including the edge case where you personally know every member of a circle you are not part of: even then you see nothing from it.
On a computer too
The same app runs in a browser at btdt.pro, same account and same circles. A computer is easier for writing postcards and uploading photos from a camera, and the phone carries what actually matters abroad: your friends’ recommendations, in your pocket, right when you are deciding where to eat.
Under the hood
Expo and React Native with TypeScript, one codebase for Android, the web and the iOS build on the way. Supabase for identity, database and permission enforcement, with edge functions for place search and for resolving attraction links. Cloudflare Workers serve btdt.pro, the smart invite link and the web mirror. Hebrew and English from day one, including correct gendered address in Hebrew.
Links
- Site: btdt.pro
- Get it on Google Play: Been There Done That on Google Play