Building AR Car Rentals, a Car Rental Platform for a Cebu Business | Matt Alexius Merano · Matt Alexius
Matt Alexius Merano built AR Car Rentals, a car rental platform now in production for a client in Cebu, between January 30 and February 10, 2025. Stack: React, Vite, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Supabase.
Between January 30 and February 10, 2025, I built a full-stack car rental platform from scratch for a client in Cebu. Before that, the whole business ran through Facebook DMs and a spreadsheet, with no website and no booking system. AR Car Rentals is now live at arcarrentalscebu.com, taking real bookings from real customers and bringing in revenue.
The problem I was hired to solve
Customers had no way to check which cars were free without sending a DM and waiting for a reply. Everything was tracked in a spreadsheet, so double-bookings happened regularly, and leads got lost in DM threads. The business was real and making money, but the manual process couldn't scale, couldn't be audited, and was losing customers.
What I built
I designed and built the platform with React, Vite, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and Supabase. Vehicle availability updates live for every visitor through Supabase's realtime layer. Bookings are captured and confirmed without anyone doing it by hand. Inquiry forms trigger automated email follow-ups that turn questions into bookings. Every page has server-rendered metadata and structured data, so search engines could find the site from launch day.
Shipping for a real client
I learned more about software engineering in those ten days than in any semester-long course. Clients judge software by what it does for their business, and a clean architecture only matters to them when it shows up in the results. Timezones, validation on every form field, dropped network requests, cheap phones: every edge case I could skip on a personal project had to be handled once real customers showed up.
Results
Within weeks of launch, the business started showing up in local search results for Cebu car rental searches, where before it didn't appear at all. Inquiries moved from DMs to forms, and the automated follow-ups now catch leads that used to slip away. The double-bookings stopped. The platform is still running at arcarrentalscebu.com.