Neznaika on Phuket
An island’s Telegram bot: housing, transport, visas, currency exchange, help when something goes sideways. Six buttons that turned out to be an operating system.
- 2026
- Assembling the system: flows, state, requests, integrations, the catalogue, statuses on the managers’ side.
The first sketch was six buttons. Behind “rent a bike” sat a business process.
A team that lives on Phuket, knows the market and has the deals with local partners wanted one bot to hold what is usually scattered across ten chats: renting a place, bikes and cars, visas and border runs, currency exchange, the awkward emergencies.
The idea and the island are theirs. The system is ours.
The user sees a few messages. Underneath is a graph: nodes, variables, conditions, transitions, external calls and the state that has to be remembered between messages.
A request does not end at “thanks, received”. It reaches a manager as a card with buttons, changes status and comes back to the person.
- a person
- a flow
- a request
- a table
- a manager
- a status
Currency exchange is one branch out of six. Inside it the rate is pulled from an external source, the amount is checked against limits, and a manager can offer their own rate and recalculate the request right there in the card.
- 39 nodes, 40 transitions
- the currency exchange flow alone
- Spreadsheet → PostgreSQL
- the housing catalogue outgrew Google Sheets; partners stayed in their own sources
- A request has a status
- accepted, declined, counter-rate, cancelled — visible to both sides
On 11 August 2026 the bot took its first real request. One person, a currency exchange, no growth charts.
From that moment the architecture is decided by how people behave inside it, not by an idea of a beautiful system. What to do when there are several managers and two of them press the button at once is the next piece of work.