Project Info
Inspiration
Owning a car in Malaysia often means a large upfront payment, a long financing commitment, insurance renewals, road tax, maintenance costs, tyre replacements, and time spent arranging workshop visits. Traditional rentals work well for short trips, while conventional leasing can still feel rigid and complicated. Inspired by modern car-subscription services such as DriveFlux, we created CarBnb to offer a simpler alternative: flexible access to a car through one predictable monthly payment. Our goal is to make getting a car feel as straightforward as shopping online.
What it does
CarBnb is a fully digital car rental and subscription marketplace built for Malaysia. Customers can browse new and used vehicles, compare monthly prices, review vehicle specifications, and customise their subscription duration, mileage allowance, and preferred vehicle options. Subscriptions are available for flexible periods from 1 to 36 months. The monthly payment can include insurance, road tax, servicing, maintenance, tyres, roadside assistance, and concierge support—everything except fuel. Customers can complete the journey online: Explore and filter available vehicles Choose a subscription plan and mileage package Create or access their CarBnb account Provide their preferred delivery details Pay the booking fee through FPX or card Track their booking and subscription through their account CarBnb also includes operational tools for managing vehicles, customers, bookings, payments, promotions, availability, host applications, and subscription activity. For OpenAI Build Week, we are extending the existing platform with a GPT-5.6-powered vehicle discovery experience. It will help customers describe their budget, commute, family size, preferred vehicle type, and driving habits in natural language, then recommend suitable cars and subscription plans from CarBnb's actual inventory.
How we built it
CarBnb is built with Next.js 16, React 19, and TypeScript using the App Router and React Server Components. Tailwind CSS and a combination of shadcn/ui, Radix UI, Material UI, and Ant Design provide a responsive, mobile-first interface. Supabase powers the PostgreSQL database, authentication, file storage, and real-time updates. Customers can authenticate through email, phone OTP, or supported social-login options. Curlec provides Malaysian FPX and card-payment processing, while Vercel hosts the production application. The checkout is implemented as a four-step flow covering subscription selection, authentication, delivery information, and payment. It preserves customer progress across authentication redirects and handles the differences between staging and production payment flows. During Build Week, we are using Codex as an engineering partner to understand the existing architecture, plan the new GPT-5.6 experience, implement changes across the frontend and backend, review code, troubleshoot integration issues, write tests, and document the distinction between the existing platform and our new hackathon work.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge was presenting a product with many interconnected variables—vehicle availability, subscription duration, mileage packages, pricing, insurance, delivery, booking status, and payment status—without overwhelming customers. Payment integration also required careful handling. FPX and card payments redirect customers outside the application, so CarBnb must safely preserve checkout state, process payment callbacks, prevent duplicate bookings, and show customers the correct result when they return. Building for both customers and internal operations added another layer of complexity. The public marketplace must remain simple and mobile-friendly, while the administration system needs detailed tables, filters, calendars, forms, payment records, and bulk operations. For the Build Week extension, the main AI challenge is ensuring that GPT-5.6 recommends only real, currently available CarBnb vehicles. Recommendations must be grounded in structured inventory and pricing data rather than invented vehicle details or plans.
Accomplishments we're proud of
We are proud that CarBnb is a working production platform rather than only a visual prototype. It brings vehicle discovery, configurable subscription plans, authentication, delivery information, Malaysian payment processing, booking management, and customer account functionality into one coherent experience. We also built a substantial administration system to support the operational side of the marketplace, including vehicle and image management, bookings, payments, subscriptions, promotions, host applications, availability, and customer communication. The platform is responsive and installable as a Progressive Web App, with mobile navigation, touch-friendly interfaces, dark-mode support, and careful handling of mobile safe areas.
What we learned
We learned that simplifying car access requires more than displaying vehicles and monthly prices. Customers need to understand exactly what is included, how long they are committing for, how mileage affects the plan, and what happens after they reserve a car. We also learned that trust is especially important for a high-value purchase. Clear pricing, reliable authentication, transparent payment status, responsive design, and timely communication are just as important as the vehicle catalogue itself. Working with Codex showed us how an AI coding partner can accelerate repository exploration and implementation while leaving important product, architecture, security, and user-experience decisions with the developer.
What's next
for CarBnb Our immediate next step is to complete the GPT-5.6-powered vehicle discovery assistant and evaluate the relevance and accuracy of its recommendations against CarBnb's live inventory. Beyond Build Week, we plan to expand the vehicle catalogue, improve personalised plan comparisons, streamline document submission and approval, strengthen tools for vehicle hosts, and develop subscription solutions for Malaysian businesses and fleet customers. Our long-term vision is to make CarBnb the simplest and most trusted way to access a car in Malaysia—without the financial and operational burden of traditional ownership.
This project did not link a GitHub repository.
Analysis
No indexed repository for this project, so there are no commit stats to show.
Technology
- CSSUnchecked
- Next.jsUnchecked
- OpenAIUnchecked
- PostgreSQLUnchecked
- Tailwind CSSUnchecked
- TypeScriptUnchecked
- VercelUnchecked
No repository was indexed for this project, so these Devpost claims have not been checked against code.
AI coding agents
No repository was indexed, so agent usage could not be checked.
Detected from committed agent config files and commit authorship. Absence of a signal is not proof an agent was unused.
Codebase size
No repository was indexed, so there is no codebase to measure.
This project did not link a GitHub repository, so there is nothing to diagram.
This project did not link a GitHub repository, so its feature claims have not been checked against code.
Export this project's context (description, README, evidence, key source files) to chat with an AI agent elsewhere.