BnbNotifier: It is live! 🚀

BnbNotifiter, an app I created to notify you of new Airbnb listings, is live.
You can view it here.

Here is a quick demo:
1. sign up here
2. go to official Airbnb Website and search for an area you want to stay in with all your specific parameters like price, dates, amenities etc.
3. copy that url
4. in the dashboard of BnbNotifier, add a new url
5. done

This is an MVP, and the code will require a full system redesign once there are more users. The app currently scrapes one Airbnb URL per hour, allowing a maximum of 24 URLs per day. This limitation came from my initial lack of experience with periodic web scraping in a production environment. However, I have gained valuable insights through the development process.

For a future revamp, I may need to explore renting a Virtual Private Server (VPS), which costs around $5/mo and would eliminate the need for AWS and Vercel. The free tier for Vercel limits me to one cron job execution per day. Ideally, I'd like a system that allows scraping at least every hour for multiple users. Despite the limitations, I'm happy with the system design so far.

I've also learned more about what it means to validate an idea. I wrote a bit about validating this concept in my blog, but I didn't fully address the feasibility of the software solution or system design. In hindsight, researching web scraping in a production environment would have been beneficial.