I've been living as an expat for years. The paperwork never ends. Visas expire on dates you swore you'd remember. Flights get cancelled at 2 AM. The city changes country and suddenly your emergency number does too. And every "expat app" I found was either a passport-to-country lookup table or a bloated web wrapper trying to sell me insurance.
So I started building the one I wanted.
Expatic began as a folder of Swift files on a laptop in Ko Pha-Ngan. No investors, no team, no product managers. Just the frustration of being someone who moves through the world and needs the world to move with them a little more gracefully.
What it's for
Expatic keeps track of the things you'd otherwise carry around in your head or in five different browser tabs:
- Where your visa expires and how many days you have left.
- Whether you're crossing the tax residency line in a country that cares.
- When your flight gate changes at 3 AM in Bangkok while you're already asleep at the hotel.
- The emergency number in the country you flew into six hours ago.
- Who else is here. Where the meetup is. Whether it's a real person.
None of these problems are new. What was missing was a single native app that treated them as one story — because for someone actually moving, they are.
The hard parts
Deciding what not to build.
The instinct on a solo project is to say yes to everything. Every rejected feature felt like an amputation. Dating got waitlisted for v1. Elaborate world maps got cut when they didn't earn their real estate. The Flight Passport went through three iterations before settling on Countries · Flights · Days — because those three numbers actually meant something. Every version of Expatic is a tighter version of the one before it.
Trusting Apple's platform.
No React Native shortcut. No web wrapper. Real SwiftUI, real SwiftData, real Live Activities, real WeatherKit. It's slower to build this way. It's also the only way the app feels like it belongs on the phone.
The nights.
Living-edge animations, the time-of-day glass tint, the way a number counts up when a new destination unlocks — none of these were sprint goals. They came from the nights when the whole thing was already working but didn't yet feel right. That's the part no roadmap captures.
Doing it alone.
Everything you see in the app was built, tested, argued with, and rewritten by one person with a lot of coffee.
What we won't do
- We won't sell your data. Everything lives on your device unless you opt into iCloud, and even then it lives under your Apple ID, not ours.
- We won't run ads. Nomad and Expat subscriptions pay for the work.
- We won't ship a feature until it's actually useful. Prototypes get deleted. Empty shells don't ship.
The mission
Every expat and long-term traveler I know has a slightly different list of small anxieties that add up to a big one: am I on top of this? Expatic exists so that the answer, for once, is yes — without having to check ten places to be sure.
The bigger idea is quieter: the people who live in transit shouldn't feel like they're doing it alone. If Expatic can make one visa expiry less stressful, one flight less disorienting, one dinner in a new city less silent — it's earned its place on your Home Screen.
Thanks for being here.