Carpool1

The need

Local shared rides are stuck between two bad options. Ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft are priced for one-off rides — not a five-day-a-week commute — and they take a meaningful cut on every trip. Community alternatives live on scattered Facebook groups, neighborhood email threads, or word of mouth, which means trust is real but coordination is painful.

Carpool1 sits in the gap: a lightweight bulletin board for a real community of neighbors. No surge pricing, no platform fee, no middleman pretending to be Uber. Just a public list of routes and requests, with built-in tools for filtering by location, time, and frequency.

What it does

• Drivers post routes — origin, destination, time, recurring days, seats available.
• Riders post requests — the same fields from the other side.
• Both sides see matches filtered by geography (map + radius) and schedule overlap.
• Direct coordination — once two users connect, contact is exchanged through the app and the rest happens off-platform. Carpool1 stays out of the money flow.
• Events — one-off carpools for concerts, conferences, and games, in addition to the recurring commuter flow.
• Sign-up in under 30 seconds — email only, no phone number or social login required.

Tech stack

• FlutterSingle codebase shipping iOS, Android, and Web from one Dart project. Cuts maintenance versus three native apps for a small team.
• SupabasePostgres + auth + storage + edge functions. Row-level security policies enforce who can see and edit what without app-side guards.
• PostGISGeospatial queries on routes — nearby pickups, radius search, route overlap — run inside Postgres rather than in the client.
• StripeDonations only. No fares on the platform, so there’s no money flow between rider and driver to skim.
• Apple Transporter / XcodeManual iOS submission flow. App Store Connect release page targets v2.41.4 with build numbers ratcheting on each ship.
• GitHub PagesThe static marketing site at carpool1.com. Decoupled from the app so a landing-page tweak doesn’t ship a new mobile build.

What the design buys you

• Zero fare friction — because the platform never holds money, there’s no payments compliance, no chargebacks, no “does the driver have a 1099?” question, and no commission for users to resent.
• Cross-platform from day one — the same UI works on iPhone, Android, and a desktop browser. New users don’t hit an “install the app” wall.
• Geographic-first matching — routes are spatial objects, not text addresses, so search returns nearby rides instead of exact-string matches.
• Lean infrastructure — one Supabase project covers auth, DB, file storage, and serverless functions, so an independently-run product can sustainably stay live on a flat-rate plan.

Status

Carpool1 is in open alpha, currently focused on the Philadelphia metro area. The iOS and Android apps are both live in their respective stores, and the web app at app.carpool1.com works in any modern browser.

Links