Inspiration
Every map app can tell you a restaurant exists. None of them can tell you whether anyone actually went. Ratings are gamed, reviews are bought, and the one source people genuinely trust — a creator they follow walking into a place on video — lives in a feed that has no map and no memory. We wanted the trust of that video with the usefulness of a map.
What it does
Spotby turns short-form food and travel videos into a curated map of places a real person actually visited. You paste a video, and the import pipeline watches it end to end: it reads the speech, the on-screen text and the frames, decides whether the creator was really there, resolves the place against Google Maps, and writes it to your map with the moment worth going for. The result is a map where every pin has a human behind it — no star averages, no astroturf. Singapore first, and the catalog now spans 200+ towns and cities worldwide.
How we built it
SwiftUI on iOS with MapKit; Hono on Cloudflare Workers with Supabase (Singapore) and a queue-backed import pipeline; Gemini for multimodal video understanding; Google Places for resolution; Sign in with Apple. Monetization is RevenueCat — monthly, yearly and lifetime against a "Spotby Pro" entitlement.
Challenges we ran into
Creators talk about places they never visited, so the pipeline has to judge presence, not just extract names — tuning that filter took several rounds of real-video review. The paywall had to hold on the server too: the import endpoint checks an entitlement table written by RevenueCat webhooks, with a live API fallback, so a modified client gains nothing.
What's next
Deeper city coverage, creator pages people can follow, and Android through RevenueCat's cross-platform entitlements.
Built With
- cloudflare
- mapkit
- revenuecat
- supabase
- swift
- swiftui
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