Japan was lovely. My planning was a mess. That's kind of why Grasstile exists.
A first-time Japan trip, way too many spreadsheet tabs, and the frustration that turned into Grasstile.
I wasn't a Japan person before I went. I'll be honest about it. A lot of people I know say cringe things in Japanese and act cringe in general because of anime, and that quietly put me off the whole idea. But I had relatives to visit in China, and I live in Montréal, so I had options: Europe, the Middle East, western North America, Southeast Asia, South Korea, Japan. Japan just made geographic sense. There were cheap direct flights from Osaka to the airport closest to my extended family.
It wasn't the cheapest trip overall. But I had a genuinely great time. The food was ridiculous. The rice tasted different, the fish was fresh, and the convenience store snacks were better than most sit-down meals back home. No offense, Canada. The trains ran on time, there were so many lines, and the stations were so big they were overwhelming (I spent a solid half hour inside Tokyo Station just trying to find the Shinkansen gate). And they were clean. People were kind and welcoming, from cashiers to chefs to strangers. Just respect the place. Don't film geishas running down the Gion alley, don't blast music on the train, and you're mostly fine.
Even with the heat I didn't expect, the rain, and the crowds, I loved it. Japan is a country that grows on you the more you sit with it. It's the only place I've ever left already wanting to go back.
But that's not really what this post is about. It's about how I could have planned it better.
Looking back, the planning was a disaster of my own making. Not the trip. The spreadsheet. The Google Sheet with tabs called "FINAL", "FINAL_v2", "FINAL_ACTUALLY_FINAL", and "DO NOT USE (use the other one)". Hundreds of pins saved on Google Maps with basically no room to write down why I saved them. A screenshot folder called "FOOD MAYBE??" with 47 images and roughly zero context for any of them. The other planning apps I tried felt cluttered and dated, and honestly the art style mattered to me more than it probably should. I didn't want 67 tabs open to plan a single week.
The other thing that bugged me: none of these tools said anything about actually being there. Etiquette. Language. I learned some Japanese, but not enough, and not the useful kind. Duolingo taught me how to introduce myself as a teacher, which is a little funny given that most foreign teachers in Japan teach English and I'm a student. I learned how to order at an izakaya by watching a salaryman flag the waitress for another beer, which, to be fair, worked. But I would have loved a heads up that women in Tokyo are often too polite to tell you you've wandered into the women-only train car. I figured that one out on my own.
And a lot of days, even with my lists ready, I didn't really know what to do. Japan spoils you with options, and the rain and the midday heat kept forcing me to rethink the plan. It's also a country where you walk a lot, especially compared to most of North America, so any itinerary that ignored time on foot was already half wrong.
The trip was about as good as it could be. The planning was the weak part. Everything I needed was scattered across too many places, in tools that weren't really built for it, and none of them ever nudged me to just go outside.
We all kind of know the benefits of going outside and touching grass.
So that frustration became the seed for what's now Grasstile.
So what is Grasstile?
Grasstile is an app about going outside. That's the honest one-liner. It helps you plan trips without losing your mind, and, more importantly to me, it nudges you to get out the door when you're not traveling.
The flagship feature is called Touch Grass. It used to basically be the whole app, and for a while the app was even named after it. These days Touch Grass is the headline feature inside Grasstile, and the travel planner sits alongside it as the important secondary half. Both matter. The name is still half sincere, half a joke at my own expense.
There's also a small mascot named Kusa, a little grass-tile character who mostly hangs around to answer "wait, how does this work" questions and point you at things. You can ignore Kusa entirely and the app still works. Some people like the company.
I want to be upfront: Grasstile is in beta. A lot of it works well and I use it myself, but it's not finished, and some corners are rougher than others. I'd rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
The Touch Grass feature
This is the part that named the app, and the part that's hardest to describe without sounding like a wellness startup, so bear with me.
Every day, Touch Grass suggests a few outdoor things to do near you, matched to your mood, the time you've got, and what you actually want out of going outside. Not an Instagram feed of impossible places. Real, doable suggestions. "Walk somewhere you've never been within fifteen minutes of home." "Go sit near water." That kind of thing.
You tell it how long you have (anywhere from a few minutes to a full weekend), who's with you, what you're after (clear head, a bit of exercise, explore, get off your screen, or nothing in particular), and how hard you want to work for it. It gives you a small set of options. You pick one, or you don't.
Here's the important part, and it's a rule I won't break: no streaks, no badges, no points, no guilt. There's no counter shaming you for missing a day. There's nothing trying to turn this into a habit you feel bad about breaking. It's a suggestion and an exit. The app is supposed to help you leave the app, not trap you in it. If Touch Grass gets you outside and then you forget Grasstile exists for the rest of the day, that's the app working exactly as intended.
It's also gotten a bit smarter about the real world lately. It looks at weather and season, and if it's pouring or dangerously hot, it'll lean toward sheltered or indoor ideas instead of cheerfully sending you into a storm. This part is newer, and I'd call it helpful rather than perfect. Weather data isn't gospel, seasons and local conditions vary, and you know your own neighborhood better than any app does. Treat it as a nudge, not an instruction, and check the actual conditions before you head out.
There's a challenge mode if you want a little structure (timed, limited attempts, or terms you set yourself), and you can save configurations you like as presets so you're not refilling the same form every time. On the top tier you can set a daily reminder email at a time you pick, which is really just the app saying "hey, go outside" once and then leaving you alone. No push notifications, no guilt mechanics.
The travel planner
The idea here is almost embarrassingly simple: one place for the itinerary, one for places, one for the budget, one for notes. Here's how each part would have saved me from my own spreadsheet.
Itinerary. Day by day, with times, locations, and rough per-activity costs. Drag to reorder for when you realize at 11pm that you scheduled Fushimi Inari for the same morning as your Shinkansen out. It also tries to flag obvious conflicts, like a double-booked slot. And if it rains, which it will, in Japan, in summer, you can put together a backup plan for the day.
Places. Type a name, it autocompletes, and it lands on a real map with context about where it sits relative to everything else. Not a Pinterest board. Not "FOOD MAYBE??". An actual map. There's also a skip list, places worth avoiding at a destination with alternatives suggested, which would have saved me thirty minutes at a tourist-trap takoyaki stand in Osaka I won't name but that absolutely deserves to be on it.
Budget. A handful of categories, planned amount against what you actually spent, side by side. So you can watch, in real time, how buying every piece of pottery in Kyoto affects the structural integrity of your flight home.
Accommodation and transport. A dedicated spot for where you're sleeping (check-in and check-out, confirmation codes, booking links) and a separate one for how you're getting around (flights, trains, ferries, rentals). One place instead of a screenshotted confirmation email you'll be frantically searching for at a hotel desk at midnight.
Notes. A proper editor, for the stuff you want to remember before, during, and after. Like the name of that ramen place in Osaka with no menu, no English, and honestly transcendent broth.
Phrase guide. Destination-specific useful phrases with the local script, romanization, and English. Food, transit, shopping, emergencies. The kind of thing I was quietly Googling at the izakaya while trying to look like I knew what I was doing.
About the AI (an honest take)
There's a "generate with AI" mode. You give it a destination, dates, a rough budget, and how you want the days to feel, and it drafts an itinerary. Is it perfect? No. It's a draft, and you should treat it like one. It once suggested a museum that had closed years earlier. It's a decent way to get past the blank page for a city you know nothing about, and then you edit everything after. The AI is the starting sketch, not the final word, and it can be confidently wrong about things like whether a place is still open or whether a seasonal ferry is actually running. Double-check anything that matters.
There's also a trip chat, where you can nudge an existing itinerary in plain language ("move day three's afternoon to day five", "give me a slower day two, I overestimated myself"). Some people love this, some never touch it. Both are fine.
Which model you get depends on your plan, and there's a monthly limit on how many plans you can generate on each tier. Free users get a fast, capable model that's genuinely fine for a straightforward week somewhere. Paid tiers use stronger models, which mostly matters for complicated multi-city trips. There's also a smart packing list generator that looks at where you're going, the season, and what you've actually planned, so it's not a generic "don't forget your charger" list.
If you burn through your monthly plan generations, there are tiles: a one-time top-up you can buy to keep generating without subscribing. They're deliberately priced as worse per-generation value than just subscribing, because if you're generating that much, a subscription is the better deal, and I'd rather be honest about that than nickel-and-dime you.
The design rabbit hole I did not need to go down
At some point I started reading about Japanese design ideas. Ma (間), intentional empty space. Wabi-sabi, beauty in imperfection. Kanso, simplicity, cutting the unnecessary.
In practice this became: warm backgrounds, muted greens, soft text, generous whitespace, calm transitions, no loud gradients. The app should feel more like a well-made notebook than a dashboard.
I also built a collectible theme system, handcrafted themes with a few free and the rest unlocked on a paid plan. Some are subtle, some are not. This is either clever or the most self-indulgent thing I've shipped, and the jury is genuinely still out.
Grasstile is also translated into a bunch of languages. I speak maybe two and a half of them well. The translations were done with care, but they're a work in progress, and if I got something wrong in yours, please tell me.
Sharing and community
You can invite people to edit a trip, or share a read-only link. There's a community section where you can browse published trips, and export options (PDF, calendar, and a few plain formats) for the one person in every group who prints and laminates the itinerary.
There's also a small guides and posts area, which is where this post lives. I'd like it to grow into an honest alternative to travel-influencer content. Real trips, real budgets, real "I got lost for forty minutes and it was actually fine" energy.
On privacy: your trips are yours. Only the people you choose can see them, unless you decide to publish. I take that seriously, and I'm still hardening things as we go, which is part of being in beta.
The tiers
Three tiers, named after growing things, because I have a sense of humor about it.
Seed. Free, and a real free tier, not a locked demo. You get a handful of trips, a monthly batch of AI-generated plans, budget tracking, saved places, public sharing, and Touch Grass. Enough to plan an actual trip.
Sprout. The paid monthly plan. Unlimited trips, more AI plans per month, smart packing lists, more Touch Grass refreshes, PDF and calendar export, more themes, and priority email support.
Bloom. The top plan, roughly double Sprout. Everything in Sprout, the most AI plans per month, the best available model, every theme, unlimited Touch Grass refreshes, daily reminders, and first access to new stuff.
(Exact prices and per-tier limits live on the pricing page, which is the source of truth, so I'm not going to hardcode numbers here that might drift.)
The free tier exists because I don't pay for most of the apps I use either, and I get it. Free should be genuinely good. If something essential is locked away that shouldn't be, tell me and I'll reconsider. Anything gated above free is either actually expensive to run or is there to fund the parts that aren't.
Japan was wonderful. I'd go back in a heartbeat, stay longer, and plan the whole thing in Grasstile, from the Shinkansen reservation to the izakaya I still can't find on any map.
If you have a Google Sheet with a tab called FINAL_ACTUALLY_FINAL, this one's for you.
It's beta, so you'll find rough edges. If you hit a bug or have an idea, reach out. I read everything, even if I can't reply to all of it. I'll be here.