Why We Built RentDo24

The ₹500 Brokerage We Refused to Pay

Second year of BTech CSE. College had just shifted hostel allotments and neither of us got a room on campus. The city broker scene was brutal — every "available" listing had a ₹500 to ₹2,000 brokerage fee attached, and half the rooms were already rented by the time you called.

RentDo24 is the app we wished existed back then. Not a Craigslist-style wall of text listings. Not a broker platform dressed up as a marketplace. A real, owner-direct app where you can see the room on a map, see the price, see the owner's verified profile — and message them directly from the app.

What's wrong with how rooms are found today?

• WhatsApp groups are full of stale posts — "still available" = listed 3 weeks ago
• Most web platforms charge owners to list, so only serious operators post — the PG aunty down the street who has one spare room never shows up
• Broker fees add ₹500–₹5,000 to a transaction that shouldn't cost anything extra
• No way to see if a room is actually near your college/office without visiting physically
• Zero transparency on actual prices — everything is "call for details"

The tech decisions (for the engineers reading this)

We're BTech CSE students, not startup founders. We chose the stack we knew: Kotlin + Jetpack Compose for Android (because we spent a semester on it), Firebase for the backend (because it's free at our scale and handles real-time sync beautifully), and Credential Manager for Google Sign-In (the modern way, no OTP friction).

The biggest challenge wasn't the code — it was the product thinking. What does a student actually need when looking for a room? We interviewed 40+ students across engineering colleges in Sambhajinagar. The answer was surprisingly simple: price, distance, and a direct line to the owner. Everything else is noise.

What RentDo24 does differently

• Owners post for free — no subscription, no featured listing fees
• Map-first discovery — you see rooms near you before you type anything
• Direct in-app chat — no phone number sharing until you're ready
• Visit booking — schedule a physical visit from the app, owner confirms
• Verified badge — we manually verify listings when possible

Who this is for

Engineering and medical students in tier-2 cities who need a room near campus. Working professionals relocating for their first job in a new city. Anyone who's ever paid a broker for information that should be free.

We started in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar because we know this city. We'll expand to other Maharashtra cities as the app matures. The core experience will always stay the same: find a room, talk to the owner, move in.

What's next

We're two students, one open laptop and a Firebase project. We ship slowly but everything we ship works. Next up: Google Maps live integration, review system for owners, and a Play Store listing once we have 50+ active rooms in the database.

If you're a room owner in Sambhajinagar, post your room free — it takes 3 minutes. If you're a student looking for a place, download the APK below and start browsing.

Room Hunting as an Engineering Student in Maharashtra — The Honest Guide

Whether you're joining an engineering college in Aurangabad, Nashik, Pune, or Nagpur, the room hunt follows the same exhausting script. Here's what nobody tells you before you arrive.

The first 48 hours are critical

Most engineering colleges have hostel capacity for maybe 30–40% of students. If you're in that 60%, you're on your own from day one. The problem is, everyone in the same batch is looking at the same time. Good rooms at fair prices go in hours, not days.

What a "good" room actually means for a student

• Under 2 km from college — you'll thank yourself in monsoon season
• Attached bathroom OR very few flatmates sharing one bathroom
• 24-hour water supply — sounds obvious, it isn't
• WiFi included or a room where you can install your own router
• Owner who actually responds to messages

Red flags in listings (we've seen all of these)

• No interior photos — only the building exterior
• "Price negotiable" without giving any starting price
• Owner insists on meeting in person before telling you the rent
• Listing says "students preferred" but sets a 10 PM curfew
• No mention of electricity bill split — it will become a problem

RentDo24 is our attempt to reduce all of this friction. Every listing on our app requires a price, real photos, and an owner who's verified their identity. Not perfect — but significantly better than a WhatsApp group post with a blurry picture.

Building a Mobile App with ₹0 Budget — Stack Choices and Lessons

We're BTech CSE 2nd year students. We don't have VC funding, we don't have a startup office, and we definitely don't have a DevOps team. Here's exactly how we built a production Android app for zero rupees.

The stack

• Android (Kotlin + Jetpack Compose): Because that's what our Android Development course uses and we didn't want to learn a new language while also building a product
• Firebase: Firestore for real-time database, Firebase Auth for Google Sign-In, Firebase Storage for room photos. Free tier covers us comfortably up to a few thousand users
• Firebase Hosting: This very website + admin panel — deployed with one command
• FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging): Push notifications for free, no third-party service needed

What surprised us

The hardest part wasn't the Firestore queries or the Compose UI — it was the Credential Manager API for Google Sign-In. The old GoogleSignInClient is deprecated, and the new way requires setting up OAuth client IDs carefully in Firebase Console. Took us two days to get right.

The second hardest thing was image handling. Getting a room photo from the gallery, uploading it to Firebase Storage with a progress bar, then displaying it in the feed with Coil — there's no single tutorial that covers the full end-to-end flow correctly.

What we'd do differently

• Set up Firestore security rules on day one, not as an afterthought
• Write a proper data model before touching any UI code
• Test on a physical device from day one — the emulator lies about performance

If you're a student trying to build your first real Android app, our code will eventually be open-sourced. Follow RentDo24 to know when.