Free on iPhone
Habibi Stay helps you find a home away from home through the people you and your family already trust. No fees. No strangers. No listings.
Available now on iPhone. Android is not yet available. Sign up for updates to hear when it launches.
An aunt in Toronto. A cousin in London. A family friend in Lahore who has hosted half the neighborhood over the years. They have space, and they would genuinely like to offer it.
They will never put their home on the internet for strangers to book. And they never should have to.
A student starting university in a new city. A family flying in for a wedding, or a funeral. Someone moving countries with two suitcases and no idea where to sleep on the first night.
Neither one of them knows the other exists.
Somewhere between them is a person who knows them both. Usually that person is the only thing missing.
That person is not a stranger to either side. They are the aunt who knows which cousin moved where, the friend who remembers who is related to whom, the one who gets the call when somebody lands somewhere new.
Habibi Stay is built around that person.
In our families, a place to stay was never something you booked. It was something someone arranged. A phone call, a name passed along, a "don't worry, I know them."
That system works beautifully, and it is falling apart quietly. The people who held it in their heads are getting older. Families are scattered across more cities than any one person can keep track of. And the group chat is not a system.
Habibi Stay does not replace that trust. It keeps track of it, and makes it easier to ask.
No nightly rates, no service fees, no money between guest and host. A host is a host, not a landlord.
Every stay runs through someone you both actually know. If there is no trusted path, there is no stay.
No listings, no profiles to browse, no reviews, no ratings. Your home is not on display, and neither are you.
Most of the time, you will be all three of these at different moments. They are things you do, not who you are.
You are traveling to a city where you do not know anyone directly, but your family might. You say where you are going and when. That is the whole ask.
A person who knows you both sees the request quietly. They decide whether it is right. If it is, they introduce you. If it is not, they let it go, and nobody is told.
The host hears about you from someone they trust, not from an app. They can say yes, or they can say no, without explaining themselves to anyone. Only when they say yes do you get their name and address.
That is the entire product. Everything else we build exists to make those three moments feel natural.
You already do this. You are the one who knows which cousin lives where, who remembers who is related to whom, who gets the call when someone needs help in a new city. You have been the network this whole time, without any credit for it.
Habibi Stay makes that easier, not heavier.
Offering your home should never mean advertising it. You will not appear in a search, you will not be rated, and no stranger will ever request to stay with you.
Arriving somewhere new is easier when somebody is expecting you. Not a host with a five-star average. An actual person, connected to your actual family.
It is easier to explain Habibi Stay by what we have chosen to leave out.
If any of these sound like features we are missing, this is probably not the product for you. We are comfortable with that.
The hardest thing about asking family for a place to stay is not logistics. It is the awkwardness of asking, of being turned down, of turning someone down.
Most of the work in Habibi Stay goes into removing that awkwardness. Declines are private. Introductions can be passed on quietly. Addresses stay hidden until someone chooses to share them. Nobody finds out they were considered and rejected.
Habibi Stay is on the App Store for iPhone. There is no invitation to wait for and nobody has to approve you: download it, verify a phone number, and begin.
If you are waiting on Android, or you would rather hear from us than check back, leave your details. We will write rarely, and only when there is something real to say.
Growing up, if someone was traveling, studying abroad, or stuck somewhere, there was always someone to call. That system wasn't written down anywhere. It lived in our elders' heads.
Years later, when my 15-year-old son was stranded overnight in Vancouver, I did what I'd always done. I called my mom. She made one call. Suddenly a cousin I hadn't seen in decades was welcoming my son into her home.
My own kids don't have that map. Habibi Stay is an attempt to carry it forward.
Moeed
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