A driving instructor I talked to last year spends every Sunday evening texting students. Confirming Monday's lessons, rescheduling Tuesday's, answering the same three questions from five different people. Two hours of WhatsApp before dinner, every week. He has been doing this for twelve years.
Swiss driving schools still run on paper, spreadsheets, and messaging apps. Students book lessons by calling a number or sending a WhatsApp message, then wait for a reply that might come hours later or not at all. Instructors carry a paper Ausbildungskarte (training log) in the car and fill it out by hand between lessons. School owners have no real-time overview of revenue, open invoices, or instructor workload. The tool that runs most driving schools in Switzerland is the instructor's phone, and it was never designed for this.
DriveFlow↗ is what I built to replace all of that. One PWA with three dashboards (student, instructor, school owner) that handles booking, the Ausbildungskarte, billing, and school management from a single app. No app store, no PDFs, no WhatsApp.
What students deal with today#
If you want to take driving lessons in Switzerland, step one is finding a school. There is no central directory. You search Google, ask friends, maybe check a local Facebook group. Each school has a different process: some want a phone call, some prefer email, some use a third-party scheduling tool you have never seen before. One school might reply in an hour, another in three days. There is no standard, no expectation, no way to compare.
Once lessons start, you have no idea how many you have done or what topics remain. The Ausbildungskarte, the official record of your training progress, lives in the instructor's glove compartment. You see it when they show it to you, which might be never. You do not know how much you have paid, what is still outstanding, or when your next lesson is unless you scroll through a WhatsApp conversation from two months ago.
This is not a niche problem. Switzerland has thousands of driving instructors and tens of thousands of students going through this every year. The tool that fixes it did not exist. So I built it.
What instructors and owners deal with#
On the other side of that WhatsApp message is an instructor trying to run thirty students through different stages of training while keeping track of who paid, who practiced what, and who is ready for the practical exam. The admin work is manual, repetitive, and eats into evenings and weekends. Lesson notes go on paper. Invoices go out as PDFs. The Ausbildungskarte gets updated in the car between students, if it gets updated at all.
School owners have it worse. They manage multiple instructors, handle billing for the whole school, and need to know at a glance whether the business is healthy. Instead they get WhatsApp groups and Excel sheets that are always a week out of date.
What DriveFlow does#
DriveFlow replaces the paper, the spreadsheets, and the WhatsApp threads with one app that has three different experiences depending on who logs in.
Students see their upcoming lessons, track progress on a digital Ausbildungskarte that updates after every drive, and pay invoices by card. Booking a lesson takes three taps. No phone call, no waiting for a reply. They can see exactly which topics they have covered and what is left before the exam. For the first time, the student has the same information as the instructor.
Instructors get a calendar that shows their day, a lesson documentation flow that replaces the paper logbook, and a student rating system tied directly to the Ausbildungskarte. Documenting a completed lesson takes under a minute. The calendar handles scheduling conflicts, cancellations, and reschedules without a single WhatsApp message.
School owners handle billing, invite instructors, manage join requests from the discover page, and see revenue, open invoices, and instructor workload in one view. The overview that used to require spreadsheets and phone calls is always current, always accurate.
All three dashboards run in the same PWA. Install it from the browser. No App Store, no Google Play, no update cycle. It works on any device with a screen and a browser. Offline support is included for instructors in areas with poor mobile signal.
Why nothing else fits#
German driving school software exists. Fahrschulmanager and Fahren Lernen Max are established products with large user bases in Germany. But they were built for German regulations, German pricing structures, and German driving schools. The Swiss Ausbildungskarte has different requirements. The billing flow is different. Even the terminology does not match. A Swiss driving instructor opening a German tool sees a product that was not made for them.
Generic scheduling tools like Calendly or Google Calendar handle booking but know nothing about driving lessons. They cannot track Ausbildungskarte progress, apply per-lesson pricing that varies by instructor and region, or manage a school with multiple instructors and students across different training stages. You end up using three or four tools that do not talk to each other, plus WhatsApp, plus the paper Ausbildungskarte. The integration work falls on the instructor.
DriveFlow is the first product that combines booking, Ausbildungskarte, billing, and school management in one Swiss-German PWA. There is no existing tool that does what it does for Swiss driving schools. That is not marketing. It is a gap in the market that has been sitting there for years.
The company behind it#
DriveFlow is built by Aeternum Software↗, my company. It is not a portfolio project or a side experiment. It is a SaaS entering pilot phase with real Swiss driving schools.
Building it as a company rather than a hobby project changes the decisions. Uptime matters. Data isolation matters. One school's data can never leak into another's at the database level. The billing has to work every time, for every transaction, across every school. These are not portfolio constraints. They are business constraints, and the architecture reflects that from the database layer up.
Entering pilot phase#
The app is feature-complete: auth, onboarding, booking with availability slots, the full lesson lifecycle from request through confirmation to completion and invoicing, a digital Ausbildungskarte with topic coverage, Stripe Connect payments, school discovery, instructor management, web push notifications, and gamification badges for student engagement.
We are entering pilot phase now. The first driving schools get free access in exchange for feedback that shapes the product before general availability. If you run a driving school in Switzerland and want a tool that was built for how you actually work, reach out at driveflow.ch↗.
The stack#
For those interested in the technical side:
- Next.js 16 with the App Router, deployed on Vercel. Mobile-first PWA with service worker caching for offline use.
- Supabase for Postgres, Auth, and Row Level Security. Every query is scoped to the user's school at the database layer. Tenant isolation is enforced by the database, not the application.
- Stripe Connect for payments. Students pay invoices directly to the school's Stripe account; the platform fee is handled automatically.
- Web push notifications for lesson reminders, booking confirmations, and invoice alerts.
- TypeScript throughout, strict mode.
