Abdulmoiz’s trip-mate
The problem
Budget travellers, especially students and young people on their first independent trips, often blow a daily budget without noticing until the last few days of the trip, and spend time hunting across separate apps for currency conversion, expense tracking, and cheap local recommendations.
The solution
trip-mate sets one simple daily spending budget per trip and shows, in real time, how much is left alongside nearby cheap food, free or discounted attractions, and the best-value local transport option, so the traveller makes one decision instead of five.
Monetisation service
A free tier covers one active trip with manual expense entry. A £2.99/month Plus tier adds unlimited trips, automatic bank-import expense tracking, and offline maps for the cheap-nearby suggestions, aimed at people who travel more than once or twice a year.
Minimum projected ARR
Abdulmoiz’s story
Abdulmoiz, 16, spends part of most family trips watching everyone try to remember which currency conversion app was cheapest, or which cash card had the least fees left on it. It is a small, repeated annoyance rather than a dramatic story, but that is exactly the kind of problem PsyntaxLabs asks students to build for: something real, close to home, that they have actually watched happen.
His app, trip-mate, sets a daily spending budget for a trip and shows what is left, alongside nearby cheap food, free or discounted activities, and transport passes. In the Make It a Real App phase, Abdulmoiz moved trip-mate from an idea into something with an actual interface: a home screen with a live budget ring, a running list of cheap-nearby suggestions, and a tips card, all designed and built with AI as a tool rather than the whole job.
The hardest part, by his own account, was not the visual design but deciding what NOT to put on the main screen. Budget apps can turn into spreadsheets very quickly, and keeping trip-mate down to one number and three suggestions took more editing than adding features did.
What Abdulmoiz’s parent thinks
“TBC”
— Faheem Anjum Sheikh