Unilifts is a ride-sharing platform that aims to simplify the act of finding and hosting rides for university students. Unilifts allows students to search for rides going between various cities in South Africa.

The platform also allows students to host rides that other students can request to join, at their set price. Ride hosts have full control over who is permitted to join their rides.

When hosting a ride, students can set the origin, destination, price, depart time, and available seats. Once a ride has been created, the host can easily share their ride on various platforms.

Students looking to join a ride can search for upcoming rides with available seats. Unilifts doesn't just search for rides matching their exact origin and destination but also shows them other nearby rides that could potentially help them get to where they need to go.

Ride hosts have full control over who they allow to join their rides. Once a student has found a ride that they would like to join, they send a "join request" to the host of that ride. The host can check the student's profile to see their ratings and reviews, and then decide whether to accept or decline the student's request to join their ride.

Only after the host has accepted a student's request to join their ride do they both gain access to each other's phone number via WhatsApp. This direct communication is still required to finalise details such as exact pickup and dropoff points, luggage policy, and any possible delays.

Unilifts doesn't just facilitate the finding and hosting of rides; it also allows students to review each other. Students who are part of a ride are able to leave a review for every other member of the ride. These reviews are then displayed on each student's profile.

When a student then hosts or requests to join a ride, other students can see the existing reviews on that student's profile. These reviews can then influence their decision to join or accept this student into their ride.

This review system aims to build a community of trustworthy and considerate hosts as well as passengers, while flagging problematic students before they join any rides.

Unilifts is built as a progressive web app, allowing users to install it on their mobile device like a native app. This simplifies development and product maintenance, as a single software product can be accessed and used on most devices.

PWAs can even implement push notifications to inform users of important events. On the Unilifts platform, we use push notifications to notify users of new join requests and when their join requests have been accepted by the ride host. For browser-based push notification, Firebase + Google Cloud Messaging is the current standard.

Unilifts is built mainly in React, on top of the NextJS framework. ShadCN, together with TailwindCSS, is used to build the user interface to ensure the platform is beautiful and functional.

We use Supabase for all our backend needs, such as Authentication, Database, Storage, and Edge Functions. Google OAuth is used to skip user account and password management, while Deno is used to build our Edge Functions.

The entire Unilifts platform is hosted on Vercel, which allows for effortless builds and deployments. Their platform also protects against most common web-attacks while providing some basic analytics out of the box.