About Will U Be There
Will U Be There is built by one person, Igor Riabchuk, from Amsterdam. I write the app, run the servers, answer the email, and pick the event feeds by hand.
The app started from a specific annoyance. A friend posts a photo from Lisbon. I was in Lisbon that week. Neither of us knew, because trips live in booking emails and nobody has the full picture. So the app does one thing first: you add the trips you already have, your friends add theirs, and when two land in the same city on overlapping dates you both get a push while there is still time to meet.
Two rules shaped everything after that. The first is that it never receives your live location. You type a city and two dates. That is all it knows, so that is all it can ever show anyone. A friend sees the overlap, the city and the dates, and nothing else from your trip list. The second is that it has to work with the friends you already have, including the ones who will not download another app, which is why a group joins by one link and never needs friend requests.
The events layer came later, once the trips were in. If the app knows you will be in Vienna from the 12th to the 15th, it can show the concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying on those dates. The feeds come from tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses and ticketing platforms, a few hundred of them, chosen one at a time. Coverage is uneven and I say so on the home page, where the counts come straight from the database every day.
The company behind it is thatUkrainianGuy, a sole proprietorship registered in the Netherlands. Data lives in the EU (Supabase in Ireland, error reports in Sentry's Frankfurt region). There is no ad SDK in the app and nothing is sold to anyone. The full detail is on the privacy first page and in the privacy policy.
The app is free on the App Store and Google Play, in 17 languages. If something is wrong, or a city you keep going back to has no events, write to info@willubethere.app. I read everything.