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I travel 4-5 trips a year and I didn't hesitate for a second to pay for Flighty, because this was one of those "man these guys deserve to be rewarded for the amazing job they've done"

I have had at least 2-3 situations where Flighty gave me information before the airport did, and that I ended up being a guy informing a few fellow passengers on the status of our flight before the airlines did.

They've chosen a niche, have executed extremely well, and I'm happy to throw $50/year at them to say thank you for an excellent product that does everything I want.

My ONLY complaint is that during a flight, flighty's live activity or something uses up a TON of battery. It seems unlike them to overlook such a thing when the rest of the app has such a polish and attention to detail (form and function-wise)

You created this account 14 minutes prior to this post. Forgive me if I don't trust your testimonials. Feels very astroturf

This app brings me so much delight. Seeing the incoming plane, knowing % chance of onetime or late.

Honestly I often know changes from Flighty for my flights before the airlines do or at least before they notify me. I had once my carrier said on time and Flighty said 90 mins delay. I went to the airport on time and turns out flight was delayed. Should have just trusted them!

The app is mac/i os-only, though.

>Why does everything have to make money? People like to built things as a hobby.

The gp asked a reasonable question. Your admonition about making money is misplaced because your assumption about it being a hobby is incorrect.

The website was developed by Flighty LLC. To answer the gp's question: Although the website itself doesn't have direct monetization, it acts as "inbound marketing" for the paid iOS app. Clicking on "Download Flighty" takes the user to the Apple App Store:

  In-App Purchases
  Week-to-Week Flighty Pro         $4.99
  Annual Savings Flighty Pro      $59.99
  Month-to-Month Flighty Pro       $9.99
  Annual Savings (Family Plan)   $119.00
  Lifetime Flighty Pro           $299.00
  Flexible Monthly (Family Plan)  $15.99
  Week-to-Week Flighty Pro         $4.99
  Week-to-Week Flighty Pro         $7.99
  Pro Family Lifetime            $449.00
  Annual Savings Flighty Pro      $59.99

It's not just a $5/month VPS. Some cursory googling says Flighty gets data from the FlightAware Firehose api which costs a lot of money. The cost would exceed the financial resources of most people to make an equivalent free hobby website. (https://www.flightaware.com/commercial/firehose/documentatio...)

You don’t know anything about my app though. I just couldn’t believe that many people would pay this subscription to keep it going. I’m not trying to make money, I just don’t need it to drain my account

Some people wonder why kids climb trees.

That to me is amazing. I would not pay that much for this and I guess I project that on the user base

Makes me wonder then why they can't afford a team of Android developers to make the Android version.

That's just a cloud with a different company's name attached.

I’ve ran the numbers and the APIs I have to pay for would be more expensive. I’ve tried caching the data which works to some degree but still a negative unless I really degrade the experience

> one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration

Flighty is all about getting you to the airport in time for your flight, so the most important pieces of information are things like departure times, connection times, delay information, terminal and boarding gate. These are prioritised in the interface.

The flight duration is set when you book the flight and it's not going to change, there is no reason to prioritise this.

> It also doesn’t surface boarding time

I think this would be useful but difficult data to get. Airlines sometimes will push boarding announcements to their own apps but I doubt they would agree to feed Flighty.

Why is duration important? Surely you already knew what it was when you booked and it's not like it changes. I can't say that I've ever wanted to double check the duration of my flight.

I think the design is great; my only gripe is it's awful on the iPad mini. But so are Apple apps. They think it makes sense for the side drawer (in portrait mode) to cover half the screen. Which is especially insane in apps with maps where the drawer COVERS THE "YOU ARE HERE" DOT.

>one of the most important pieces of data for a flight, its duration,

What is your use case for Flighty, and why would this information be important at all?

I use their widgets more than the app itself. They display the most important information I need well imo.

If you think this is an easy problem to solve, here's an old article that discusses some of the challenges in doing so:

https://medium.com/google-design/google-maps-cb0326d165f5

This screams vibe-coded slop. Think about it, if you were to implement zoom based detail level, you would have to try hard to introduce a bug on line 3, yet it happens to hit prod.

Yet, this thread is full of people defending this pre-alpha quality thing.

Haha I came in to write the exact same thing. Such a weird choice

A select airport view has flight data limited to some x hours, meaning you cannot even see if a flight later in the day is still scheduled to arrive on time without consulting those official pages anyway. So quite objectively no, it's not even objectively worse, it's effectively useless.

Going back to a map view from an airport view resets the map, so exploration for fun is again borderline unusable.

Not sure how they're getting their data, but https://tsa.fromthetraytable.com/

Ideally the TSA at each airport would measure it and release it. They should be measuring it anyway since they should both have efficiency targets for how much of a delay they introduce, and also so that they can show data about how much or little inconvenience they cause when DOGE finally comes to cut one of the actually utterly useless government expenditures.

Since the TSA doesn't seem to be releasing this data though, apple or google could spy on GPS and motion data for individuals to estimate when people entire the line and pass through security, and derive a better-than-nothing estimate. It does seem like the government refusing to do something, and apple/google stepping in and doing a government-like thing is a norm, so even though I'm joking I wouldn't even be that surprised.

the app has so many bugs and missing features, I'm not a heavy user just like 60 flights a year but I love and hate flighty

> Airports desperately need to be displaying accurate information [..]

Airports and airlines may have information that they deliberately do not share with passengers.

For example: a large European airport that I once did some work for ran a trial in which they announced departure boarding gates significantly earlier. The effect was that passengers went to their gates earlier.

The side effect was that retail revenues in the terminal fell during the trial. Yes, this was a metric.

Guess what? They decided not to proceed with announcing departure gates earlier and went back to the previous system.

Yeah, I think that flighty already aggregates various data sources to predict flight delays, I thought maybe they were expanding to include security wait times.

Flighty is in a weird place because I'm a rare/leisure traveller and wow Flighty nowhere near reasonably priced for that market.

I used it in free mode when I was on iOS, but it would be ~£10 per trip for something that would improve my life less than a coffee at the airport.

In my opinion they need to aggressively cut costly features (like weather data), and if they have different international data feeds, perhaps do region locked pricing. I don't fly to the US much, so let me buy a Europe and Asia subscription and skip the US costs. Or vice-versa. It would have needed to be ~£10 a year at most.

Flighty routinely tells me about cancelled flights before any other app or the airline itself.

I agree, I find that the "MiseryMap" from flightaware is less "pretty" but much more informationally dense. https://www.flightaware.com/miserymap/

This web app has very little design-wise in common with the iOS app. It doesn’t even serve the same use case.

They’ve hurt their brand here really, which is a high quality native app experience that makes sense of a lot of granular data from different sources.

I am commenting on the entire app experience on iOS not a single web app they released today (which unfortunately is what can be linked on HN).

Read the other comments and you'll see the same, download the iOS app and use that as your basis for commenting.

I've never seen what you describe but I have seen other data issues. It usually depends on the airline, the same types of problems occur with the same airlines.

I've asked and they say there's little they can do, the airlines systems are broadcasting this data and some airlines are better at it than others.

I imagine you live your life contextually, whereby your daily experiences are felt against the backdrop of the immediate events you, then your community, and eventually the world at large. If the rest of the world was involved, why not bring it up?

OP makes a good point. No vibe coded app could do this. AI grants productivity. Not taste, wisdom, or talent.