nestalo.ba: water and power outage alerts for Kanton Sarajevo
People in Kanton Sarajevo often learn about a water or power cut after it has started. We built nestalo.ba, a free service that tells you before it happens, for the addresses you care about.
The problem
Utilities publish planned interruptions as announcements on their own websites. They are easy to miss, hard to search by street and written for the whole canton, not for your home.
What we built
nestalo.ba collects the public announcements from the water utility (ViK) and the power utility (EPBiH), reads out the affected streets, and matches them to the addresses a user has saved. On the day, the user gets a message by Telegram, push notification or email, plus reminders they choose themselves.
- Live map with light and dark mode, built on vector tiles
- Address matching by street, neighbourhood and proximity
- A "not at home" pause for holidays
- No password: sign in with a magic link
- Installable as an app (PWA) with push notifications
- GDPR tools: export and delete your data at any time
Under the hood
A Python backend (FastAPI) runs scheduled scrapers, normalises messy announcement text and stores the results in PostgreSQL. The site is server-rendered with a light JavaScript layer and Leaflet and MapLibre for maps. It runs on Google Cloud (Cloud Run and Cloud Scheduler) behind Firebase Hosting.
Why it matters for your project
nestalo.ba is a complete product we designed, built and still run ourselves: scraping, data cleaning, notifications, maps, privacy and hosting. The same pieces appear in client work such as monitoring tools, alert systems and data pipelines.