The Problem Nobody Talks About
Picture this: You’re trying to find a place to meet up with friends. Someone suggests a coffee shop. It’s 8 minutes from their house. It’s 45 minutes from yours.
You say yes anyway, because suggesting a different place feels awkward.
This happens all the time — with friends, with remote teams, with family scattered across a city. And the worst part? Most “meet in the middle” suggestions aren’t actually in the middle. They’re just the geographic midpoint, which completely ignores traffic, transit options, and the fact that roads don’t go in straight lines.
I got frustrated enough to build something about it.
Meet Meetle
Meetle is a free web app that finds the fairest meeting spot for any group of people — based on real travel times, not just distance. A Chrome Extension is coming soon so you’ll have it one click away in your toolbar.
You add everyone’s starting location, choose how each person is traveling (driving, walking, or transit), hit Find Meeting Point, and Meetle does the math across every person simultaneously. It then surfaces the best nearby cafés, restaurants, parks, gyms, or whatever venue type you’re looking for — ranked by actual fairness.
No more “it’s fine, I don’t mind the drive.” Now you have data.
How It Actually Works
Under the hood, Meetle uses three Google Maps APIs working together:
Distance Matrix API calculates travel time from every person’s location to every candidate venue, simultaneously. This is the core of the fairness scoring — you can’t rank venues fairly without knowing everyone’s actual travel time to each one.
Places API finds candidate venues near the calculated center point. You can filter by type (coffee, food, parks, gyms, etc.), price level, minimum rating, and whether they’re open right now.
Maps JavaScript API renders everything visually — the map, the travel zones (isochrones), and the markers for each suggested venue.
The scoring works two ways and you can toggle between them:
- Fairness mode — minimizes the maximum travel time across the group. Nobody gets stuck with an unreasonable commute.
- Efficiency mode — minimizes the total travel time. Best if you’re trying to save the group’s collective time, even if it’s not perfectly equal.
Features That Actually Matter
A few things that make Meetle more useful than a quick Google Maps search:
Mixed travel modes. One person is driving, another is walking, a third is taking the subway. Meetle handles this — each person picks their own mode and gets their own routing.
Travel zones (isochrones). You can see a visual zone on the map showing what’s reachable for everyone within your chosen time limit. If a venue falls outside someone’s zone, it gets filtered out automatically.
Arrive Together mode. You pick a meeting time, and Meetle tells each person exactly when they need to leave to arrive simultaneously. No more “I’ve been here for 20 minutes” texts.
Real traffic. You can set a departure time and Meetle uses Google’s live traffic data. A 10am meeting on a Tuesday has very different travel times than a 6pm Friday meeting.
Save groups. Regular team meeting? Save the group once and load it with one click next time.
Share link. After finding a spot, generate a shareable link so everyone in the group can see the results and the map.
The Chrome Extension Story
Here’s where it gets technically interesting, and also a little humbling.
I originally built Meetle as a standard web app. When I decided to package it as a Chrome Extension, I hit Chrome’s Manifest V3 Content Security Policy wall hard.
MV3 extension pages cannot load remote JavaScript. Google Maps JavaScript API is a remote script. Meaning: if you try to build a Chrome Extension that loads Maps the normal way —
