Case study 03 of 08
Drinkmates
A social app for going out: find drinking buddies, join nearby events, share locations with your group and split the bill.
01The Problem
A night out runs across too many apps: one to find people, one for events, a group chat to coordinate and another to settle the bill.
People who are new to a city, or whose friends are busy, have no easy way to find others who want to go out.
02The Approach
I built one Supabase backend for both the web app and the mobile app, in a Turborepo monorepo, so features ship to both from shared code.
Core logic such as matches, groups and event invites lives in Postgres functions, which keeps the clients thin and the rules in one place.
03The Solution
Drinkmates covers the whole night in one app.
- Swipe discovery that matches people by bar preferences and location.
- Group hangouts with realtime chat and location sharing, built on Supabase Realtime subscriptions to Postgres changes.
- Nearby events with invites and RSVPs.
- Bill splitting by scanning a receipt or entering items, also available as a free public tool at
/split-bill. - Google and email sign-in through Supabase Auth, with location data stored only temporarily.
04The Why
PostGIS runs nearby searches inside the database, so the app never pulls every user to the phone to filter by distance.
Realtime subscriptions on table changes give live notifications and chat without a separate websocket server.
Shipping Android first gets the app in front of real users before App Store review.
05The Result
Drinkmates is live on Android and the web, with iOS coming soon. Public Nairobi events on the site already show RSVPs.