🚖 DadCab

Track. Honk. Tip. — an Uber-style ride tracker for one very specific driver: Dad.

DadCab is a private family PWA. Kids request a ride, watch Dad's cab move on a live map, get a push notification when he's close, and rate the ride (and the driver) when it's over. Dad gets a dispatch view, ride queue, and — because no family app is complete without it — a live panel showing what the whole thing costs to run.

Built for the O'Brien family. Live at dadcab.fly.dev (invite-only — the URL token is the credential).

What it does

• Ride requests — kids pick a saved destination (school, practice, a friend's house) and request a pickup. Requests de-dupe so mashing the button doesn't summon five dads.
• Live tracking — Dad's phone streams location while a ride is active; the kid's view shows the cab moving on a map with ETA.
• Ride lifecycle — request → accept → en route → picked up → arrived, with push notifications at every step.
• Ratings, both directions — riders rate the driver and the driver rates the riders, across fun custom categories (snack provisioning, aux-cord generosity, on-time departure...). Stats pages keep the leaderboard honest.
• Messages & moods — lightweight in-app messages and mood check-ins between driver and riders.
• Ride history — every completed trip, browsable.
• Cost panel — the admin view queries the Fly.io billing/machines APIs to show what the app actually costs to host (spoiler: nearly nothing).

How it works

• Backend: FastAPI (~1,200 lines total) + SQLite. No ORM, no framework magic — db.py is plain SQL.
• Frontend: vanilla JS/HTML PWA — separate installable views for kids (/k/…), Dad (/d/…), history, and admin. Per-role web manifests so "Add to Home Screen" opens the right page.
• Push: Web Push (VAPID) via pywebpush; expired subscriptions self-clean on 404/410.
• Auth: a secret room token in the URL is the invite; a PIN + signed HttpOnly cookie keeps sessions. Secrets come from env vars (Fly secrets in prod) — nothing sensitive in the repo.
• Hosting: a single small Fly.io machine with a volume for SQLite. Dockerfile + fly.toml included.

Run it yourself

uv sync
uv run uvicorn app.main:app --reload

On first run a dev room token is generated into data/secret.txt. Open http://localhost:8000/k/<token> for the kid view, /d/<token> for the driver view.

Deploy: fly launch, then set secrets (DADCAB_SECRET, DADCAB_COOKIE_SECRET, VAPID_PUBLIC, VAPID_PRIVATE, VAPID_EMAIL).

Why

Because "I'm five minutes away" has meant anywhere from 5 to 40 minutes for as long as cars have existed, and the kids deserved better telemetry.