About RoamWise
Last updated 24 July 2026
RoamWise is a travel planner built by one person. My name is Mohit Pandey and I work from Almora, a hill town in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand. There is no team, no office and no investor money behind this. That shapes everything about how the product works, so it is worth explaining up front.
Why I built it
I kept watching people plan trips badly, and I kept doing it myself. The pattern is always the same. You read a listicle that recommends the same six places everyone else recommends. You arrive in peak season with everyone else who read the same article. You pay a taxi fare that is triple the going rate because you have no idea what the going rate is. You come home having spent more than you planned and having seen a version of the place that exists mainly for visitors.
None of that is because travellers are careless. It is because the information that would prevent it is scattered, out of date, or written by someone being paid to recommend a hotel. What is missing is not inspiration. There is plenty of inspiration. What is missing is the boring, specific, local knowledge that a friend who lives there would give you in ninety seconds.
What RoamWise actually does
- Tells you what things should cost. An auto-rickshaw in most Indian cities runs roughly ₹25–35 to start plus ₹15–20 per kilometre. When someone quotes you ₹400 for a two-kilometre ride, you should know that instantly. The app carries these bands for transport, accommodation and food across India, Southeast Asia and Europe.
- Warns you about the specific tricks. Not vague advice to "be careful" — the actual mechanics. The driver who says your hotel is closed and knows a better one is on commission. The scooter rental that photographs your damage after you leave. The card machine that offers to charge you in rupees while you are abroad, at a terrible rate.
- Shows crowd patterns by month. The same place can be wonderful in October and miserable in December. Most of the difference in trip quality comes down to timing, and timing is the cheapest thing to change.
- Builds a real budget. Including the costs headline prices leave out: airport transfers, local transit, the tips, the buffer for the thing that goes wrong.
- Works offline. Once a trip is saved, it opens without a signal. This matters more than it sounds — the moment you most need your itinerary is often the moment you have no data.
How it makes money
I would rather tell you this plainly than have you wonder.
- A one-time payment for Pro. Not a subscription that quietly renews. You pay once and it stays unlocked.
- Affiliate commissions on some booking links. If you book a hotel after tapping through from here, I may earn a percentage. This never changes what gets recommended — the crowd data and cost bands are computed the same way regardless.
- Advertising on the website, which is why there is a privacy policy explaining what that involves.
- Merchandise — printed travel tees, made to order.
What I do not do: sell your data, sell placement in recommendations, or pay for reviews.
Things I will not build
People ask for features I have turned down, and the reasons are consistent enough to state publicly.
- Scraped contact databases. Harvesting emails and phone numbers from social platforms breaches their terms and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act. A public profile is not consent to be added to a marketing list.
- "Areas to avoid" lists. Safety advice about pricing and paperwork is checkable. Safety advice about neighbourhoods and people is usually prejudice wearing a helpful expression, and I would rather have no feature than that one.
- Fake urgency. Countdown timers here count to real deadlines. Seat counts show real numbers. When a founder offer closes it stays closed.
- Claims the app cannot support. The built-in engine, Ailon Tusk, is data and rules — travel guides, weather, cost models, mapped places. It is not a language model and the app says so.
The low-carbon side
Travel has a real climate cost and pretending otherwise helps nobody. RoamWise calculates emissions using published conversion factors from DEFRA/BEIS and IPCC AR6, shows lower-carbon alternatives for a given distance, and keeps a ledger of what you avoided.
One deliberate choice: the app says emissions avoided, never "carbon removed" or "climate reversed". Taking a train instead of a flight genuinely avoids emissions. It does not pull existing carbon out of the atmosphere. Overstating that would be greenwashing on your behalf, and an honest number is the only kind worth putting on a certificate.
Contact
Email founder@roamwise.co.in. I read everything myself. If something in the app is wrong — a cost band that is out of date, a place that has changed — telling me is genuinely useful and I will fix it.
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