Flowmoco-MyCoast-Case-Study-Template-4.0

My Coast

My Coast Ltd

The My Coast Platform powers a mobile app offering real-time coastal safety information for Cornwall, including tides, sea conditions, and weather, while recommending activities based on a dynamic assessment of the day’s conditions.

The Challenge

The My Coast Platform evolved as a resolution to a real-life problem. If you want to enjoy the fantastic Cornish coastline and explore the amazing beaches, how can you do this whilst keeping safe? There was no application available which provided real time information on tides, sea conditions, weather, local facilities, maps and directions; all together in a singular mobile app. The My Coast Platform provides significant growth opportunities for local businesses and offers wider support for the local economy, by encouraging tourists to visit the area.

Flowmoco won a competitive pitch against 20 other development agencies to build the platform.

Why Flowmoco?

Out of 19 compliant bidders, Flowmoco was the standout choice for My Coast. Their shared passion for the project, combined with a wealth of experience and commitment to working with hyper local businesses and organisations in Cornwall, made them the perfect choice of partner. We know that My Coast isn’t just a ‘job’ for Flowmoco. The whole team is invested and knows just how important the app will be in saving lives, as well as helping people have a great day out. We meet and talk regularly and have loved the truly collaborative experience of developing My Coast together.

Jo Murray, My Coast

The Results

The My Coast MVP platform and mobile application went live in Summer 2022, on budget and on time, which as any Project Manager knows, doesn’t happen all that often. Jo Murray, the founder of My Coast, spoke of the success of the platform and the future for the service:

“From our pilot launch, with only three beaches included, we saw 7000 downloads of the app, with a dwell time of up to 8 minutes. We were thrilled with these results, and they gave us the confidence and information we needed to press on with expanding the app to the 60 RNLI lifeguarded beaches across Cornwall.”

The full Cornwall release, with all 60 lifeguarded beaches went live in July 2024.

The Technology

Flowmoco’s Technical Architects and Developers got to work, setting up a Wagtail CMS on the cloud, connecting to a PostgreSQL database for My Coast staff to create and manage beach information. An AWS ‘Textract’ tool was employed to read the daily PDF files from South-West Water, RNLI and The Met Office and extract the necessary data.

The Django framework was used to process the data and make it available to the mobile app via a Graph QL interface. Navigation and distance information was sourced from Google, with mapping data sourced from Ordnance Survey, using APIs. Firebase is a BaaS (Backend-as-a-service) which we built into the architecture, for analytics and push notifications to be sent to the My Coast mobile application. Finally, by employing Hasura, we saved a lot of time in generating an authenticated GraphQL API layer to connect to the PostgreSQL database. We also used Hasura to tie in the other data sources that send data to the mobile application. Flowmoco now hosts and maintains the platform on AWS cloud services for My Coast.