PolarisComing soon
One app for everything before, during, and after the trip.
Polaris brings your itineraries, budgets, currency, translation, safety info, and a community of real travelers into one place. So you can spend less time managing your trip and more time actually on it.
Why
You bookmark TikToks for inspo. You build the itinerary in a Google Sheet. You dig through Gmail for the boarding pass. You split dinner in Splitwise, look up “is this neighborhood safe at night” on Reddit, and re-do the same currency math you did three hours ago. Travel is the most fragmented thing most of us do — and the tools were never built to talk to each other.
Planning a trip today feels like assembling IKEA furniture with the instructions spread across 15 websites.
01Tools
Weather where you're going. The currency you're switching between. Time zones for staying in touch with home. A countdown to the flight. Nearby ATMs, pharmacies, laundromats, and luggage storage — pinned to where you actually are. The widgets you've been pasting together across five apps, composed around the trip you're actually on.
02Path
Share where you've been — countries, regions, cities, and the trail of pins between them. See the percentage of the world you've covered. Keep your map private, share it with friends, or make it public. Opt in to auto-import pins from your geotagged photos so the map fills itself in.
03Trips
Build a trip from the ground up — flights, lodging, car rentals, a daily itinerary, a want-to-do list. Set a budget once and watch it track itself as you spend. Split dinner expenses with the people on the trip without leaving the app. Add activities recommended by travelers who've actually been there. Share the whole trip with the people coming with you — or with family back home, so your mom doesn't keep asking where you are.
04Community
Real-time city chats wherever you land. Sidequests — open plans you can join (or post yourself) when you don't want to do Teotihuacán alone. Community boards where solo travelers and digital nomads swap practical tips: what to pack for Acatenango, which coworking space has the best wifi, which neighborhood actually fits your budget. Solo doesn't have to mean alone.
Tools
Built native, not bolted on.
Explore
Featured destinations, curated lists, and the places the Polaris community is actually traveling most. Skip the same top-10 listicle every blog regurgitates — see where real travelers are going right now and what they're saving for later.
Before You Go
Pick your passport and your destination — see what's typically required for a visa, the best months to actually visit, and which rideshare apps will get you from the airport to your hotel. A quick-reference starting point instead of five tabs of government websites and Reddit threads. Always verify visa specifics with the destination's official source before you book.
Bucket List
A running list of dream destinations, restaurants, hikes, and stays you add over time. Polaris surfaces them when you start planning a relevant trip. Browse what the rest of the community is saving most to see where the world is actually pulling people next.
Activities
Browse what's around you from partners like Viator and Tiqets — the experiences that are actually near you the moment you land, not a generic top-10 list. Filter by what your group is into. Tap through to book on the partner site when you're ready.
Safety
The country's real emergency number — not 911 muscle memory. Your home embassy's address and phone. Step-by-step guidance for the situations travelers actually face: a lost passport, a stolen phone, a medical issue abroad, a missed flight. Pre-loaded for every country, available offline once you've opened the page.
Stance
What we won't do
Most travel apps are built to maximize bookings. Polaris is built to maximize clarity. Cleaner data. Honest comparisons. Affiliate partnerships clearly labeled. No ads sneaking into recommendations. No upsells masquerading as reviews.
What we do instead
When we recommend something, you see the full picture — the rideshare apps that work in-country, the eSIM services that actually have coverage there, the practical stuff you need on day one. Affiliate partners and non-partners side by side. The goal is the best answer, not the most lucrative one.
The North Star has guided travelers for centuries — Polaris is a fixed point in a noisy world of curated feeds and sponsored “must-sees.”
WaitlistLaunch
Join the waitlist and help shape what we build next. We'll send one email when the app launches. No spam, no marketing blasts.
I'm Zack. I've been traveling the world full time for the past 2 years. I've been all over North and South America and Europe — mostly solo, mostly while working full time from wherever I'd landed. The friction has been the same every time.
It's standing in an airport line digging through Gmail for a boarding pass not being able to remember what airline im flying with and searching for the word flight in the subject line. It's trying to figure out the next stop on a Tuesday night between meetings — flights open in one tab, lodging in another, a spreadsheet I keep promising myself I'll clean up. It's a Notes app full of tips travelers gave me in person and TikTok and Instagram save folders I built religiously and never opened again.
It's asking ChatGPT for the best place to eat in Roma Norte and getting a top-10 that reads like every other top-10. It's splitting dinner three ways across two currencies and opening four apps to do it. It's the slow burn of doing all of this — the booking, the budgeting, the safety research, the currency math — on top of an actual job, in cities where I'm trying to actually be present.
Travel is the most fragmented thing most of us do. The tools were never built to talk to each other — they were built to capture a booking and hand you back to the chaos.
I'm a software engineer. I kept assuming someone would build the version that actually worked. After enough trips, I gave up waiting and started building it myself.
Polaris is the app I wish I'd had every time I opened five browser tabs to plan a weekend and closed them an hour later with nothing decided. One place for the trip you're planning, the trip you're on, and the trips you've already taken. Not a booking funnel. Not an ad surface. Just the thing in your pocket when you land somewhere new.
— Zack