RapydBuddy

making travel more affordable, sociable, convenient, and environment friendly

Comment

Inspiration

Carpooling is one of the most visible and rapidly evolving areas towards the paradigm shift from vehicle ownership to vehicle usage shared mobility, and therefore one of heightened importance, as it addresses the need for mobility of the population in contexts where the most traditional modes of transport are less effective. img

img From the above image, we can picture that choosing to carpool is the possibility to cut fuel costs and the social aspects, allowing interesting chats during the trip.

As far as corporate carpooling, we have thought of the problems employees face, even though globally we have good reliable taxi services. Many employees come to the office alone while many employees search for a taxi. Why can’t we connect both together? Therefore, it requires a service that aims to resolve the problem for individual workers who need to travel to their workplaces or way back home at affordable prices.

We built RapydBuddy, a multi-purpose app for each corporate organization, and their employees who are searching for a taxi to travel back home or to the office can actually search for a nearby colleague who is traveling alone and are welcome to share the ride. This will help both the parties as well as the environment. Powered by Rapyd API, RapydBuddy can manage wallet-to-wallet transactions so people can pay for their rides fast and conveniently.

What it does

RapydBuddy leverages technology to fill empty seats on the road, connecting members looking to carpool or travel by cab, and making travel more affordable, sociable, convenient, and environment friendly. RapydBuddy is a progressive web app that utilizes the world’s largest local payment network through the Rapyd APIs to make payments scalable globally. With the help of Rapyd, RapydBuddy provides the fastest way to accept and send payments between travelers exploiting the carpool services. Features

  1. RapydBuddy App provides global login to each corporate organization so that a company’s database would be secured within their organization.
  2. Furthermore, these onboarded companies can generate a RapydBuddy EWallet ID for their employees, that can be used to pay or accept payments for the ride.
  3. Employees with their own vehicle can volunteer to provide the ride to their colleagues to their destination and also have the right to put the estimated cost on the ride. And, others who want to carpool, can directly check the availability based on their route and time.
  4. Based on the number of people riding on the same route the amount will be split equally and can be easily paid using Rapyd Wallet.

How we built it

RapydBuddy is a progressive web app having its client interface developed on ReactJS and served as a static website from the Azure Storage Account Gen2. And, this client interface is connected with the ExpressJS backend server hosted on the app service in Azure Cloud. This Express server provides the interface for the Rapyd Payment APIs and does all the application logic. We have stored all the Rapyd API secret keys in the Azure Key vault for secure access. Other than that we have utilized the quick integration NoSQL database, Firebase, for the user and ride information management. Payments within the application are powered by the RapydAPIs for wallet-to-wallet creation, payment transfer, also for retrieving the information of senders and receivers information. Here’re the details of the Rapyd APIs we have utilized in this carpooling application:

  1. /account/transfer to transfer wallet to wallet payment among co-riders & driver
  2. /user/:walletID to retrieve the person's wallet information using wallet Id
  3. /user/:walletID/accounts to retrieve the person's wallet balance using wallet Id
  4. /user/:walletID/transactions to retrieve the person's payment transactions using wallet Id

Challenges we ran into

  1. Working with new APIs from Rapyd was totally new to us. Learning it at pace while trying to use it was challenging but fun!
  2. While working with the Rapyd API for checkout in Python Language we faced a problem while calculating signatures, so we moved to NodeJS and continued working on that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We are also proud of having a clean working super app in the time frame.
  2. We built the whole product in under a week on a tech stack and using a language that we never worked with.

What we learned

When we started working on the development and we never thought working with Rapyd API is that easy to use, sandbox mode really helped. Wallet creation and wallet-to-wallet frictionless cross-border payment was an interesting challenge.

What's next for RapydBuddy

We enjoyed working on our actual problem statement and to make it more reliable we RapydBuddy wants to extend our functionality.

  1. We will not restrict it to just carpooling within the organization but also we can extend it to search colleagues for more fun activities like booking movie plans, standup shows, or a trip.
  2. Also with the existing database of employees within the organization, we can also extend our functionality by introducing birthday/work anniversary events.
Share this project:

Updates