I'm a solo developer in New Zealand. For the past few months I've been building Matcha, a dating app for people who want something serious. The problem I kept seeing: matching is easy, but most matches never turn into a date. The chat dies somewhere around "so where should we go?", especially when one person would have to travel across town. So I built Meet in the middle: In the chat, pick coffee, drinks or food, a day and a time Matcha works out the halfway point between your two areas and finds places near it that are actually open at that time You see the spot with its photo, rating and hours, and can flick through a couple of others Send it, and your match accepts with one tap. You both get a reminder 30 minutes before A few things that were harder than I expected: The midpoint can reveal where someone lives if done incorrectly, so locations are rounded to a general area first. Each person only sees their own distance to the venue. Google Places requests are counted in Postgres against a monthly cap and a per-person cap. Past either cap it falls back to OpenStreetMap, so it stays in the free tier. Google doesn’t allow storing their photos, so the chat card fetches the photo each time it’s shown. The place lookup for that is free. Suggestions are signed by the server, so a modified client can’t send a fake venue. Women message first is enforced by a database trigger, not just the UI. Stack: React + Vite, Capacitor (Android and iOS), Express on Railway, Supabase. Free on Android and at matchadating.app. iOS is in App Review. Feedback welcome. Would this make you more likely to meet someone, or is planning the date in-app too much?   submitted by   /u/Sevastipol [link]   [comments]