Show HN: Gliddy – AI trip plans for $4, no subscription

Gliddy, a solo-founder travel planning tool, launched publicly on August 25, 2026, charging a flat $4 per itinerary with no account or subscription, per a Show HN post by the product's author.

The product works by asking three questions — destination, trip length, and who's traveling — then generating a day-by-day plan delivered to the user's email as both a web page and a PDF. Per the Show HN post, the plan includes a hotel matched to the user's arrival airport, restaurant recommendations with real addresses for each meal, and walking routes on a map. Generation takes five to ten minutes. The service currently supports English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and French.

The founder describes building Gliddy after growing frustrated planning trips in spreadsheets. The stated premise is that generic "Tokyo 4 day itinerary" articles don't fit individual travelers, and no human writer can economically produce a personalized plan for every person — but an LLM can. The stack is Next.js 16, React 19, Supabase, and LemonSqueezy for payments. Claude handles the itinerary writing; a separate smaller model reorders routes so days don't backtrack geographically, according to the Show HN post.

The founder is candid about current limitations. Gliddy only handles single-city trips of three to five days — the post notes that multi-city requests like Tokyo plus Kyoto are a frequent ask. On pricing, the founder describes $4 as "just enough to let the model think for a few minutes" but acknowledges uncertainty about whether it's the right number. Quality evaluation relies on a set of 13 hand-curated sample plans that new outputs must beat, a method the founder openly flags as imperfect. Free sample itineraries are available at gliddy.danorie.com/samples without a signup.

The product's direct competitive framing, per the founder, is not against other travel apps but against the behavior of prompting a general-purpose chatbot. "If you enjoy prompting an itinerary out of a chatbot, you're not my customer," the post states. The $4 is positioned as buying a specific, structured output — airport-matched hotel, map-ordered days, and a PDF — delivered from three questions rather than an open-ended conversation.