Hi, I'm Vanpelt.
Solo bootstrapped founder of TravelMaxing — the budget-DIY trip planner with visa rules, cost-of-living data, and weather windows in one place.
I built TravelMaxing the way I planned my own trips: drop a few destinations on a map, then immediately see what they cost, whether I need a visa, and what the weather's doing. The information was always out there — buried across fifteen browser tabs, three Reddit threads, and a government PDF nobody updates. I just put it in one view.
The app is bootstrapped, no VC money, no growth-hack playbook. I ship it from wherever I happen to be that month. If something on the site is wrong or missing, it's because one person hasn't gotten to it yet — and that person reads every email.
Why TravelMaxing exists
The travel-planner space has two big modes. Booking aggregators (Booking, Expedia, Kayak) help you transact, but they don't help you decide where to go. Itinerary apps (Wanderlog, TripIt) help you organize what you've already booked, but the hard work — choosing destinations that fit your budget and timing — they leave to you.
Budget-conscious travelers are the worst-served users of every existing planner. The questions that matter at 1am while you're drafting a six-week trip — can I afford a month here, do I need a visa, will it be raining the whole time — live in different tabs. TravelMaxing exists to put those answers next to the destinations themselves.
That's the entire pitch. Plan smarter, not harder. Same money, more memories.
A bit of background
I'm 28, Belgian, and based in Brussels when I'm not on the road. Five years in corporate IT before this, now building products solo on the side while transitioning toward full-time entrepreneurship. TravelMaxing is one of those products — the one I most wished existed back when I was planning my own trips.
I've traveled across Europe as a student and now split the year between Belgium and Asia — currently long stints in Vietnam and Thailand while shipping the product. Not a passport-stamp maximalist; I prefer staying somewhere for weeks at a time and actually figuring the place out.
That bias shows up in the product: TravelMaxing is built for multi-week, multi-stop, slow-ish travel rather than 4-night city breaks. If you're planning a single weekend in Lisbon, Google Flights will serve you fine. If you're planning a 60-day Southeast Asia loop on €40/day, this is the tool I wished I had.
You can see places I'm personally enthusiastic about on the gems map — restaurants, viewpoints, hostels, and weird side trips I've actually been to.
How TravelMaxing handles data
Every number on the site is sourced from something I can point at — not invented by AI, not pulled from a single travel-blog opinion. Visa rules come from the open passport-index dataset, aggregated monthly. Cost-of-living comes from publicly-aggregated daily-spend data across 330+ cities, with my own validation passes for outliers. Best-time-to-visit recommendations are built from historical weather + seasonal price signals.
If you want the full methodology, those pages live here:
Press, partnerships, and how to reach me
If you're a journalist, podcast host, or fellow indie maker — happy to chat, share data, or appear on shows. Same email for bug reports, partnership ideas, or feature requests.
Email: admin@travelmaxing.app
Want to see what TravelMaxing actually does?
Plan a trip