Founder · travel booking platform
SevenlyTravel
A travel-booking product built end to end as founder: React Native app, hotel-supply API integrations, Stripe payments, and AWS hosting — every layer from checkout UX to infrastructure cost.
React Native / Expo · Node.js · Stripe · Hotel-supply APIs · AWS CloudFront / S3 / ECS
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Problem
Travel booking is a solved problem for giants and a brutal one for everyone else: inventory lives in third-party supply APIs with their own latency, correctness quirks, and rate limits, while customers expect instant search and airtight payment handling.
As a founder, the constraint set is different from big-company work: every architectural choice is also a cost, support, and velocity choice.
Constraints
- Hotel-supply APIs are the source of truth for price and availability — and they disagree with themselves between search and checkout.
- Payments must be correct under every failure: a customer charged without a confirmed booking is an unacceptable state.
- A tiny team: the architecture has to be operable by the people who built it, in their spare cycles.
Architecture
An Expo/React Native front end ships one codebase to both app stores. Search fans out to supply APIs through a Node.js aggregation layer that normalizes inventory into one internal shape and caches aggressively where supplier terms allow.
Booking is a two-phase flow: price re-verification against the supplier immediately before capture, with Stripe payment intents held until the supplier confirms — so the failure mode is 'booking didn't happen', never 'charged without a room'.
Static assets and the web surface ride CloudFront/S3; the API layer runs on ECS, sized for a startup's traffic rather than an enterprise's budget.
Outcome
- Shipped as a working product with live supplier inventory and real payment flows, run by a founding team.