Rahi means traveller

Why it exists

Every mapping app in the world will route a motorcycle from Bengaluru to Mysuru. None of them will tell you that your tank won't make it past Maddur, that the rain reaches Srirangapatna about when you do, or that the rider behind you stopped eleven minutes ago and nobody noticed.

Those are the things that actually decide how a day on the road goes. They're also the things you learn the hard way — standing at a dry pump, pulling over in a downpour with no wets, turning back thirty kilometres to find someone.

Rahi is an attempt to put what riders learn the hard way into an app, for the roads we actually ride: single-lane state highways, ghat sections with no bars for an hour, check posts, and fuel pumps that close earlier than you'd like.

Built for here

Not adapted for India — built for it. That shows up in small decisions everywhere:

• Mileage is learned from your refuels, because the brochure figure is optimistic by roughly ten percent and that gap is what strands people.
• Offline maps download the corridor along your route, because mobile data outside cities is not a thing to rely on.
• Voice between riders keeps working with no network, because the good roads are exactly the ones with no network.
• State permits and entry rules are part of planning, because riding across India means crossing borders that have opinions.
• There's a night theme that won't wreck your night vision, because rides run late.

How it's paid for

It isn't, yet. Rahi has no ads, no subscription, no analytics and no data to sell — which means it also has no revenue. It's built because the person building it wanted it to exist.

If that changes, it changes honestly: something paid that's worth paying for. Not ads, and not your location history. That's a commitment made in public here so it's harder to walk back later.

Where it's going

Rahi is early. It has been ridden with for months, but it is about to meet a great many more roads than the ones it was built on, and there are rough edges you will find. What's here works and is used on real rides — but it's a young app, and honest about it.

Next is the launch itself — Google Play and the App Store — and after that, extending how far riders can reach each other when there's no network at all.

Photographs

The riding photographs on this site are by Manas Manikoth, Nitin Mishra, Rohit Kumar, Husain Aziz, Jayakrishnan K P, Ambitious Studio, Thibault Lam Tran, Gangadhar Koppula, Chirayu Sharma and Jonathan Charles, published on Unsplash under its licence. They are not photographs of Rahi riders — when we have our own, these come down.