The gap it fills
Egypt didn’t have a production-grade geolocation API built for the local market — text search, directions, geocoding, reverse geocoding, priced and billed for real usage. Geolink is that layer: Flask + SQLAlchemy underneath, a credit-based billing system on top (free monthly credits → account balance → credit limit), and an admin dashboard for the operational side.
Running at real scale
~5 million requests a month, 50+ active clients — startups, real products, individual developers. That volume forced real engineering, not a demo API: multi-layer caching (API keys, endpoint pricing, system settings), connection pooling (20 persistent + 30 overflow), and async queue-based usage logging so billing never blocks a request path. A unified dashboard endpoint replaced what used to be several round trips — 10x faster for the one screen every client actually looks at.
What’s under the hood
- 8 Flask Blueprints, React Context API frontend with intelligent caching
- Docker containerization, Gunicorn/Waitress in production
- Over 2,200 lines of documentation — this was built to be integrated against by people who aren’t me