The Trip That Made Me Build PlanFare
I've spent the last three years building tools for people who don't want to stop traveling just because travel is expensive.
The first one was MagicCost Planner. A budgeting tool built specifically for Disney trips. Anyone who's ever planned a Disney vacation knows the particular challenge — the base package is a number you can stomach, and then you start adding the actual Disney experience to it, and by the time you're done, you've spent three times what you originally budgeted for. MagicCost Planner was my answer to that. It's been running for a couple of years now, serving thousands of families planning the specific kind of trip Disney charges for.
I thought that was the app I was going to build. Singular. Disney was the niche, the community was passionate, the pricing math was hard enough to be worth a dedicated tool. I wasn't planning a second product.
Then in June 2023, I took fifteen people to Mexico.
The Mexico Trip
My wife and I, our three kids, plus cousins, in-laws, and a few close friends. Finest Playa Mujeres for eight days. I was the one who pitched the trip six months earlier, so I was the one who became the unofficial logistics coordinator. That meant tracking deposits, coordinating flights, managing the group chat, figuring out airport transfers, and serving as the human ledger for fifteen people's worth of expenses.
By the end of the trip, I had three spreadsheets, a Notes app full of half-finished thoughts, forty-seven unread WhatsApp messages, and no clear picture of who had paid what.
We came home. I processed the chaos over the next few weeks. And I kept waiting for a tool to exist that would have handled it.
I already had MagicCost Planner for Disney. But Disney is its own specific beast. The Mexico trip needed something broader — a trip budgeting tool that could handle a $55,000 group vacation with fifteen people across three generations, track a $280 private airport transfer split three ways, and settle up at the end without me playing accountant.
That tool didn't exist. Not really. There were itinerary apps. There were splitting apps. There were general budgeting apps. Nothing built for the actual shape of how people plan real trips.
So eventually, I started building it.
Why a Second App
When MagicCost Planner started growing, I noticed something in the user emails. Families would write in saying "I love this for our Disney trip, do you have anything for our summer beach week?" or "Can I use this for a cruise?" or "We're doing a road trip with my parents next month — any way to adapt this?"
The answer was no. MagicCost Planner is Disney-specific on purpose. Disney's pricing, upgrade paths, and hidden costs are unique enough that the tool is tuned specifically for them. Trying to stretch it to cover every other kind of trip would have made it worse for everyone.
But the demand was real. People who budgeted one Disney trip a year were also taking weekend getaways, work trips with personal days tacked on, group vacations, cruises, road trips with the kids. And they wanted the same level of tool for those trips.
PlanFare is that tool.
What PlanFare Actually Is
PlanFare is a trip budgeting and planning app for every kind of trip that isn't Disney.
You create a trip. You pick from a template (Weekend Getaway, Long Weekend, Work Trip, Road Trip, or start from scratch). You set a budget. You log expenses as you go — manually, by snapping a photo of a receipt, or by pasting a booking confirmation email and letting the app parse it. You see your budget breakdown in real time. When the trip is over, you get a summary of what it actually cost, which is either useful data for next year or an argument to never open the app again.
For group trips, everyone in your Travel Circle can see the same budget and log their own expenses. At the end, PlanFare calculates who owes whom with the minimum number of transactions. No more "wait, you owe Sarah $47, but Sarah owes me $62, so actually..."
There's a free tier that lets you plan one trip at a time with everything unlocked. If you want to plan multiple trips simultaneously, it's $4.99 a month or $34.99 a year.
That's the product.
What I've Learned Shipping Two Apps
Building MagicCost Planner first taught me a few things that shaped PlanFare:
Niche beats broad, until it doesn't. MagicCost Planner succeeded because it was ruthlessly specific — Disney, nothing else. PlanFare works because it has the opposite philosophy — every trip, with cruise mode and templates handling the specific parts. Different products, different approaches, same principle: build for the trip people are actually taking, not the abstract concept of "travel."
Pricing matters more than features. I agonized over the PlanFare pricing for weeks before settling on $4.99 monthly / $34.99 annual. I could have charged more. The math for take-home revenue gets easier at $9.99. But travel is episodic — people don't subscribe year-round for a tool they only use four times a year. Lower price, higher conversion, longer retention. The math works out.
Solo founder means ruthless scope. I built PlanFare in roughly eight months, part-time, while running MagicCost Planner and working a full-time job. Every feature I added, I had to justify against the question "will this meaningfully change whether someone pays for this?" Most of the things I wanted to build didn't pass that test. The ones that did are in the app. The rest are in a backlog I may never ship.
The tool you build is the tool you needed. This sounds obvious but it's not. A lot of indie founders build tools for an imagined customer. MagicCost Planner and PlanFare both came from trips I personally took, where I personally couldn't find what I needed. That's the highest-quality product signal there is.
What's Next
PlanFare is live at planfare.app. It's stable, it's fast, and it handles the trip types most people actually take.
If you're planning a trip — any trip — and you want a tool built by someone who's had the exact spreadsheet meltdown you're about to have, it's free to try.
And if you've been following the MagicCost Planner story and wondering whether I was going to build something beyond Disney, the answer is: yes, and it's here.
Thanks for reading. Plan good trips.
— Khalid