Palya Palya: book, play and improve at padel, in one place
Book a padel court, find partners and enter tournaments: the app for players and clubs, on the App Store and Google Play. The club manages courts, members and competitions from one tool. Born in Mauritius, designed for other countries.
Context
Palya was born in 2025 as padel.mu, for the Mauritius Padel League tournaments, until then run on WhatsApp and Excel. Clubs quickly wanted more: booking a court, running their community, getting players of similar level to play together. Today the platform brings together over 400 players and 24 listed clubs.
The problem
A club juggles booking software, one WhatsApp group per tournament and a spreadsheet for the rankings. Everything had to come together in one product, for players on their phones and staff at the front desk, then open up to clubs outside Mauritius.
What I built
I built it in three parts that share a single account: the players' website, the clubs' portal and the mobile app, published on the App Store five weeks after its first day. AI agents write a large share of the code; I lead and I review.
What changed
- Booking, signing up for a tournament and tracking your level all happen in the same app, at every partner club.
- Registrations, draws, scores and rankings live in the tool, no longer on WhatsApp.
- Each club has its own time zone and currency; the directory is open to every country.
Key facts
Over 430
registered players
24 clubs
listed, 18 of which have already published tournaments
Over 420
tournaments published on the platform
Features
- Booking: real-time slots, price per player, memberships.
- Tournaments: pair registration, waiting list, groups then knockout rounds.
- Challenges: challenge-based rankings between pairs, open matches filtered by level.
- Palya Level: a level calculated from results, for balanced matches.
- Messaging: one conversation per tournament, with notifications.
- Club portal: bookings, members, coaches and payments to approve.
Technology
- Next.js: the players' website and the clubs' portal.
- Flutter: a single codebase for the iOS and Android apps.
- Go: the level calculation.
- PostgreSQL: clubs, bookings, tournaments and results.
- OpenAPI: a contract between the server and the app, checked at every release.
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