Equidistance – find a meeting spot that's equally painful for everyone

Name: Equidistance – find a meeting spot that's equally painful for everyone
Availability: InStock
Author: lambfruit

by lambfruit·Feb 18, 2026·1 point·1 comment

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AI Analysis

●●SolidSolve My ProblemEye Candy

Fair meeting-spot finder using travel times instead of geographic midpoints—clean UX, real problem.

Strengths

•Travel-time fairness is genuinely smarter than geographic midpoints; respects real-world routing and transit schedules.
•Includes departure time awareness (train schedules matter) and public transport support—not trivial.
•Beautiful, minimalist interface; indie business prioritization adds personality.

Weaknesses

•Entirely dependent on Google Maps API pricing and availability; no fallback or offline mode.
•Market is small and somewhat solved by luxury travel apps; unclear if standalone MVP survives against Maps/Apple Maps integrations.

Post Description

I built this after the usual tussle with friends about where to meet.

I tried every other meet-in-the-middle app, but they weren’t practical because they relied solely on geographic midpoints. The centre can be a 45-minute trip for one person and a 10-minute trip for another, depending on the route.

Equidistance uses the Google Maps Distance Matrix API to test a grid of candidate points and picks the one that minimises the difference in travel times. It then searches for actual venues (cafes, pubs, etc.) near that point and scores them by fairness.

It supports public transport, driving and walking. There’s also a departure time setting, since equidistant times depend on which trains are running.

The app prioritises independent businesses, but it will show chains if nothing else is available.

Stack: vanilla JS, Google Maps APIs (Distance Matrix, Maps JavaScript, Places)