u/Junaid_kh

My cousin runs a small travel agency. A big chunk of her work is helping clients apply for US visas - which means filling out the DS-160, a 45-question government form on a portal that times out randomly.

I built her a quick browser tool to make it easier. Nothing fancy - a clean form + bookmarklet that autofills the official portal directly. Took a week.

Once it was working I figured other people might find it useful. Posted it in a couple of Facebook groups for immigrants and expats. Mostly just curious if anyone else hated the portal as much as she did.

Woke up the next morning to 20 DMs. Mostly from other travel/visa agents asking if there was a version they could use with their clients, some features, etc.

Lesson: Dont wait for the "perfect" version of your project. Share the prototype ASAP. You will be suprised by the results

The CEAC portal (official U.S visa portal) times out after 20 minutes of inactivity. The DS-160 takes way longer than 20 minutes to fill out. There's no auto-save. If you step away, get interrupted, or just take too long on a section - you lose everything and start over.

I got fed up with this (family member lost a full application twice) and built a free browser tool that autofills the DS-160 for you directly on the official CEAC portal.

How it works:

• You enter your info once
• The tool fills in the fields automatically as you go through each page
• You still submit through the official CEAC website — nothing changes about the actual process
• Nothing is uploaded to any server. Everything stays in your browser

It's completely free, no account needed. It's part of Fillvisa (fillvisa.com), which I originally built to fix USCIS PDFs that won't open in Chrome.

Sharing here because I know how brutal that timeout is. Happy to answer any questions about how it works.

DS-160: https://fillvisa.com/form/usa-ds160/