Press Kit

App name

Up Sticks

Pitch

Find where to live in Australia by real drive time, not guesswork.

Price

Free to download, including a free search. £4.99 to unlock real drive-time results for one search, or £14.99 for a 30-day Relocation Pass covering unlimited searches.

Platforms

iPhone and iPad, iOS 18.0 or later

Release date

August 2026. Email for the exact date or an advance build.

App Store

Live from release day.

Developer

Sam Rowley, independent developer, Manchester, UK

Website

upsticks.app

Developer site

srowley.com

One sentence

Up Sticks ranks Australian suburbs by the real driving time to the places that matter to you, then shows the rent, schools and transit for each one.

One paragraph

Choosing where to live in a country you have never lived in is normally done with a map, a rental site and a lot of guessing. Up Sticks replaces the guessing with data. You tell it the places you need to reach, such as a workplace, a school or a relative, and how long you are willing to travel to each. It then calculates the genuine road driving time from every suburb to every one of those places, and ranks the suburbs that satisfy all of your limits at once. Open any suburb and you get typical rents, nearby schools, public transport and photographs of the area.

Full narrative

The problem. Relocating to Australia means committing to a suburb before you have ever stood in it. The tools that exist answer the wrong question. Property sites show you what is available, not whether it works for your life. Maps show you straight-line distance, which is close to meaningless in a city built around motorways, harbours and rail corridors. Two suburbs the same distance from a workplace can be twenty minutes apart in practice, and nobody moving from overseas has the local knowledge to know which is which.

The approach. Up Sticks starts from constraints rather than listings. A household names the fixed points in its life, gives each one a maximum travel time, and the app works backwards to the set of suburbs that satisfy every constraint simultaneously. The travel times are real road routes, so the ranking reflects the drive somebody would actually do. Hard filters cover rent range and schools nearby, so a suburb that fails on affordability never reaches the shortlist in the first place.

Why the timing matters. The decision is rarely made in one sitting. A recruiter names a hospital, a school offers a place, a partner gets an interview somewhere else entirely, and each of those events changes the geometry of the whole problem. Up Sticks is built for that: adjust the acceptable travel times as much as you like at no cost, and run a fresh search when the locations themselves change.

What it is not. Up Sticks does not list properties, take a commission, or have an opinion about where you should live. It narrows thousands of suburbs to the handful that are geographically viable for your household, and leaves the choosing to you.

Features

• Ranks suburbs by real road driving time to every place you need to reach, not straight-line distance.
• Handles multiple destinations at once, each with its own maximum travel time.
• Hard filters for weekly rent range and schools nearby, so unaffordable areas never reach your shortlist.
• Per-suburb detail: typical rents, nearby schools, public transport access and photographs of the area.
• Adjust your travel-time limits and re-rank as many times as you like without running a new search.
• Covers Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, with data updated without waiting for an app release.
• No account required. Searches and saved suburbs stay on your device.

Screenshots are raw device captures at full resolution, with no marketing frames or overlaid text, so they can be used directly as editorial images.

The zip contains twenty-four raw screenshots, in both light and dark appearance: twelve iPhone at 1179×2556 and twelve iPad at 2064×2752, covering the home screen, adding places, setting priorities, choosing a region, the ranked results and a suburb detail view. The app icon is included at 1024×1024. Suburb photography inside the app is licensed Creative Commons and credited in full under Data Sources in the app; please carry those credits if a photograph is the focus of an image you publish.

Sam Rowley is an independent developer based in Manchester, UK. He has spent sixteen years in mobile development, ten of them specialising in iOS and the last four as a principal engineer.

He built Up Sticks while planning his own family's move to Australia, after finding that the available tools answered the wrong question. They could show what was available to rent, but not whether anywhere was actually viable for two people whose jobs would be in different places. Up Sticks is the first app he has released under his own name.

More at srowley.com.

Sam Rowley · [email protected]

Happy to provide a promo code, answer questions about the data sources, or talk through the routing approach in more detail.