Canada’s $54M ArriveCAN app recreated for pennies to prove feds wasted cash

Canada: “Creating the ArriveCAN app will cost the government $54 million.”
Toronto: “Hold my beer.”

Two Toronto tech companies have trolled the Canadian government after rebuilding the controversial app for a sliver of what the government put in for it.

ArriveCAN has been causing headaches for travellers since its 2020 inception. So much so that a constitutional freedoms group filed a lawsuit in federal court against it. As of September 30, the app is no longer mandatory but it still manages to ruffle feathers to this day.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, both TribalScale and Lazer Technologies held “hackathons” to show how easy — and cheap — building the app actually is.

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Lazer Technologies co-founder Zain Manji says his team was able to clone the entire app in less than two days. He says the $54 million price tag is much too much.

Building an app for the entire country of Canada is no easy task, especially for the Canadian government

There are so many challenges associated with it, especially behind the scenes, but $54M is a bit too much

Dan from Lazer built an ArriveCAN clone in less than 2 days https://t.co/DCYVmchV73 pic.twitter.com/IWJiSHflR8

— Zain Manji (@ZainManji) October 10, 2022

“We felt it was important to create a clone app to focus attention on the problem, and hopefully open up discussion as to why Canada doesn’t have the best structure, resources, frameworks to produce new technology efficiently,” Manji says.

Lazer Technologies hopes this project gets the government to see how smart and talented the Canadian tech community really is.

“We hope this demonstrates that there are extremely talented engineers, designers, product managers, and consultants out there who are capable of delivering outstanding work in an efficient manner,” the company said in a statement. “We hope the government takes this into account for the future as considering more diverse technical partners in Canada for their projects.”

Elsewhere, TribalScale announced their team spent two days replicating the ArriveCAN app.

“We have the world’s best digital product builders right in Canada and our government allowed this to happen,” says CEO Sheetal Jaitly.

We are so upset over the waste spending on ArriveCan that @TribalScale will rebuild this app over the weekend! We have the worlds best digital product builders right in Canada and our government allowed this to happen pic.twitter.com/P2uNcNMoir

— Sheetal Jaitly (@SheetalJaitly) October 7, 2022

TribalScale released a video of what the team built this past weekend and said that they will make their code public.

The company also announced it’s forming The Canadian Technology Consortium as a free advisory resource for the Canadian government at all levels across the country. The first meeting will take place Friday, October 14.