Product Overview

Welcome to PubCrawl — a complete, production-ready group night-out booking marketplace you can deploy, brand, and run as your own. This page introduces the product, who it is for, the user roles, the add-on ecosystem, and the technology behind it.

Want to get running first? Jump to the Installation Guide. For the big-picture business case, read on.

What PubCrawl Is

PubCrawl is a single, self-contained Next.js 16 application. There is no separate API server, no microservices, and no mobile codebase to wire up — the public storefront, the signed-in portals, the REST API, the install wizard, and the admin panel all live in one deployable project.

Out of the box, PubCrawl gives you everything needed to launch a booking marketplace:

A public storefront at / — marketing pages, a crawl catalogue, search, and booking.
Crawls and departures — hosts (guides) list bar hops, cocktail nights and themed crawls; each crawl runs on scheduled departures with a fixed number of spots.
Booking & checkout — crawlers pick a crawl, choose a departure, book one or more spots, and pay a deposit or the full amount.
Extras and "what's included" — paid add-ons (e.g. a photo package) and the included items shown on each crawl.
Coupons and gift cards — promotional discounts and prepaid credit.
Cancellations & refunds — tiered policies with an admin approval queue; spots are released on cancellation.
Blogs — content marketing built in.
Hosts — public guide profiles and a host workspace for guides.
A customer dashboard — bookings, messages, notifications, payments, wishlist, reviews and more.
An admin panel — manage every part of the marketplace without touching code.

Everything is backed by PostgreSQL (via the Neon serverless driver) using plain SQL — no ORM, no migration framework. The schema is created idempotently by the install wizard and ensure*() helpers, so a fresh download sets itself up on first run.

Who It Is For

PubCrawl is built for entrepreneurs, tour guides, agencies, and nightlife operators who want a credible booking marketplace without building one from scratch:

You are…	PubCrawl gives you…
A solo guide	A storefront, booking, and customer area ready to brand and launch.
A nightlife tour operator	Multiple guides, departures, extras, and reporting.
An agency	A resaleable, white-label marketplace you can deploy per client.
A developer	A clean Next.js + TypeScript codebase with full source, no vendor lock-in.

Because you receive the full source code, you own the deployment, the data, and the customisation. There is no per-seat SaaS fee — host it wherever you like.

The Roles

PubCrawl ships with distinct experiences, each on its own URL space, all sharing one codebase and one database.

Role	Dashboard	What they do
Admin	`/admin`	Run the whole marketplace: listings, bookings, guides, customers, refunds, marketing, settings, and license.
Host (guide)	`/host`	List crawls, manage the calendar/departures and reservations, handle the inbox, view insights, payouts, billing.
Customer	`/customer`	Book spots, track bookings, manage payments, messages, notifications, wishlist, reviews, and profile.
Influencer	`/influencer`	Promote crawls via referral links, track clicks/visits, and earn commissions and payouts.

The public storefront at / is open to everyone — visitors browse crawls, guides and blogs, then sign up and book a spot.

What the Admin Panel Covers

The admin panel (/admin) is data-driven and organised into modules, including:

Marketplace — listings (crawls), bookings, guides, customers, extras.
Marketing — coupons, gift cards, partners, testimonials, leads.
Bookings & Revenue — reservations, payments, refunds (approval queue).
Content — blogs, pages, FAQs, gallery, hero slider, menus, theme builder.
Settings — payments, currencies, countries, languages, roles & permissions, users, integrations, master-data, backup, API tokens, webhooks, and notifications.

The Add-on Ecosystem

PubCrawl keeps the core lean and delivers advanced capabilities as built-in add-ons. There are 93 add-ons bundled in the source (src/product/addons/) — there is no separate file to upload or zip to install. Each add-on is unlocked by a combination of license entitlement and an admin toggle.

Add-ons fall into two groups:

Channels — pluggable providers for payments, storage, email, live chat, analytics, AI, SMS, WhatsApp, and more (for example: Stripe, PayU, Airwallex, MercadoPago, dLocal, eWAY, Tidio live chat, GA/GTM/Meta Pixel/Clarity/PostHog/TikTok analytics).
Features — functional modules such as affiliate/influencer, two-factor auth, audit logs, maps, AI-assisted translation, and more.

This means you start with a focused core and switch on exactly the capabilities your business needs, when your license entitles them. On a development host the entitlement check is bypassed so you can explore everything locally.

See the Add-on Development Guide to learn how add-ons are structured and how to build your own.

Technology Stack

PubCrawl is a modern, all-TypeScript stack with no PHP, no Java, and no separate backend to operate.

Layer	Technology
Framework	Next.js 16.2 (App Router) + React 19
Language	TypeScript 5
Database	PostgreSQL via `@neondatabase/serverless` (raw `sql\``` tagged-template queries — no ORM, no migration framework)
Styling	Tailwind CSS 3
Auth	Custom JWT (`jose` + `jsonwebtoken`); admin uses an `admin_token` cookie, customers a signed cookie
Passwords	bcryptjs
Email	nodemailer
File storage	AWS S3 SDK → Cloudflare R2 (and other S3-compatible providers)
Images	sharp (resize / format conversion)
Maps	leaflet / react-leaflet
PDF	jsPDF + jspdf-autotable (invoices and booking documents)
Icons	lucide-react + react-icons

Because it is one Next.js app, the storefront, dashboards, and API all run from the same npm run build / npm start. The schema is created on first run by the /install wizard — no manual migrations to maintain.

What You Get on First Run

A fresh download has no database configured, so the app redirects to the install wizard at /install. It checks requirements, collects your database connection, activates your license, creates your admin account, and saves your site settings — then your storefront is live. See the Installation Guide for the full walkthrough.