Travelmaxing.

The brief. Replace the form-and-list pattern that defines every travel site with a single screen, a map, and lead with the budget constraint instead of the destination.

What it is

Travelmaxing is a free trip-planning app for DIY budget travelers. The usual flow on a booking site starts from a destination and discovers halfway through that it's out of budget. Travelmaxing inverts that: you start from your origin and your budget, and the globe colours by what you can actually afford.

"Travel maxxing" is a Gen-Z framing of an old idea: squeezing the most experiences, culture, and value out of every single trip. Same budget, more memories. Same time off, more countries.

Travel budget first

Most travel sites assume you have a destination. Travelmaxing assumes you have a budget. Set a per-day number and an origin city; the map filters to the countries that fit and everything else falls away.

The cheapest combinations of flight + accommodation + cost-of-living surface automatically, with open-jaw routing that exposes hidden savings you'd never find on a standard search.

The four numbers every trip runs on

The app rests on four data layers, all surfaced on the same globe.

• Cost of living. real per-day costs for 199 countries, refreshed weekly.
• Visa rules. colour-coded by your passport, updated monthly.
• Weather windows. the best two-week travel window for any destination, computed from historical climate data.
• Meetups. opt-in, never noisy: travelers in the same city the same week as you.

The AI planner

A built-in AI planner takes a vague intent ("ten days, $1500, warm weather") and assembles a full multi-stop itinerary you can save, share, and edit. It composes around the four data layers, so suggestions are never blocked by visa rules or off-season weather.

For travelers who'd rather start from a shortlist than a blank canvas, curated trip templates cover the most common shapes. "Two weeks, $1500, warm", one click, a working itinerary.

Each stop carries through to local activities, with bookable experiences and links to ground-level operators.

How it's built

• Front-end. Next.js, deployed on the edge.
• Map. Mapbox GL JS, with country-level styling driven by per-country budget and visa data.
• Data pipeline. cost-of-living, visa, and weather datasets normalised into a single per-country object, so any filter becomes a one-line predicate against that shape.
• AI planner. a streaming endpoint that emits stops into the itinerary panel as the model works, so the user sees a trip take shape rather than watching a spinner.

Why it exists

The travel-booking space has been stuck in the same paradigm for fifteen years: long forms, ranked lists, hidden fees. The hypothesis behind Travelmaxing is simple: collapse the planning surface to a map, lead with the budget constraint, and let geography do the work.

It's free, with no upsells. Some outbound booking links are affiliate (Booking.com, Aviasales, GetYourGuide): same price for you, a small commission back to keep the lights on.