I Built a Web App That Finds the Fairest Meeting Spot for Any Group (and It's Free)
The Problem Nobody Talks About Picture this: You're trying to find a place to meet up with friends. Someone suggests a coffee shop. It's 8 minutes from their house. It's 45 minutes from yours. You say yes anyway, because suggesting a different place feels awkward. This happens all the time — with friends, with remote teams, with family scattered across a city. And the worst part? Most "meet in the middle" suggestions aren't actually in the middle. They're just the geographic midpoint, which completely ignores traffic, transit options, and the fact that roads don't go in straight lines. I got frustrated enough to build something about it. Meet Meetle Meetle is a free web app that finds the fairest meeting spot for any group of people — based on real travel times , not just distance. A Chrome Extension is coming soon so you'll have it one click away in your toolbar. You add everyone's starting location, choose how each person is traveling (driving, walking, or transit), hit Find Meeting Point , and Meetle does the math across every person simultaneously. It then surfaces the best nearby cafés, restaurants, parks, gyms, or whatever venue type you're looking for — ranked by actual fairness. No more "it's fine, I don't mind the drive." Now you have data. How It Actually Works Under the hood, Meetle uses three Google Maps APIs working together: Distance Matrix API calculates travel time from every person's location to every candidate venue, simultaneously. This is the core of the fairness scoring — you can't rank venues fairly without knowing everyone's actual travel time to each one. Places API finds candidate venues near the calculated center point. You can filter by type (coffee, food, parks, gyms, etc.), price level, minimum rating, and whether they're open right now. Maps JavaScript API renders everything visually — the map, the travel zones (isochrones), and the markers for each suggested venue. The scoring works two ways and you can toggle between them: Fairness mo