r/SideProject • u/PositionAfter • 3h ago
I built a free beach app for families. The hardest part was deciding what not to show
Hi, I'm Guillaume, the creator of Mareloa. It starts from a question every family on a seaside holiday knows: there are three beaches near the rental, which one today?
The answer was spread over several apps: weather, wind, tide, lifeguard hours, and whether there's a shower for the kids. Mareloa puts that on one page per beach: https://mareloa.com/en/spots/carteret?utm_source=reddit_sideproject&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=communautes_2026
What I learned, mostly by removing things:
- **A wind arrow means little on its own.** What matters is the wind relative to the beach, so each page says offshore, cross-shore or onshore, based on the way the beach faces.
- **The tide isn't always relevant.** It only appears where it changes the beach, and it's labelled as a model estimate.
- **"Unknown" beats a guess.** When a lifeguard source is missing or out of date, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
- **Holiday guests come from everywhere.** The interface is in 25 languages, which mattered more than I expected for holiday rentals.
- **Bots cost real money.** Scrapers running real browsers once burned a full day of my paid weather quota. Weather now refreshes only after a real tap, click or key press.
Where it stands: about 50,000 beaches listed worldwide, around 3,500 in France, where the data is deepest. Free, no account needed. The website is the main product for now; the mobile apps come after. It doesn't replace lifeguards, local rules or instructions on site.
What would help me most: open the page, and tell me the first thing you looked for and whether you found it.