Alternatives
Products that do what I reverse engineered and documented United Airlines in flight API does
I was on a flight today and was perusing my old repositories on github for something to work on. Low and behold I find this old Gem. Figure I would share it here
- 1DS
Hey HN, We're Steve and Tom (YC S18), the co-founders of Duffel (https://duffel.com/), an API-based travel platform. Think of Stripe, but for searching and booking flights. We built Duffel after running head first into the problem of accessing airline inventory for a side-project that we had. All the providers out there (ever heard of a GDS? Amadeus? Sabre?) felt antiquated, expensive and quite frankly didn't even want to work with us. To top it up, once we started digging the only things we could hear were "PNR", "IATA", "ARC", "RBD" and other wonderful acronyms. It’s…
2021
- 2FV
I built a real-time flight tracker that renders 10,000+ aircraft on an interactive 3D globe, entirely in the browser using Rust compiled to WebAssembly.
Apr 2026 · flight-viz.com
- 3
- 4IR
Sharing an internal tool that accelerated my development work 10-fold, especially with API debugging. Thought fellow developers here might find it useful. As a developer, I often have trouble reproducing errors at the client end. https://intercept.rest lets me debug and monitor API requests and responses. It is similar to the Network tab in Chrome Developer Tools but works for any API: mobile apps, webhooks, frontend etc. After I shared it with a close circle of friends, they found it incredibly useful and even found new use cases, I never imagined. Been a long time lurker here and…
2018
- 5AJ
In my spare time to remind myself that I could actually build stuff (and learn some Python, Flask, Redis, etc) I put together a simple job board to feature the best jobs in the API industry. The jobs can be either building APIs at companies like Twilio, Box, Stripe, etc. or integrating them. In addition to featuring those jobs, I'm also aggregating API jobs from GitHub Jobs, Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, and 37signals Job Board. Today I launched with what I would consider an 'MVP' with jobs from SendGrid, TokBox, Twilio, Zencoder, Parse, Stripe, Pusher and Box. Check it out, I'd love to know…
2012
- 6FA
2015 · go.pedge.io
- 7PF
Hey HN! A long time ago I built a map of trains at trains.fyi, and then realized nobody had bought planes.fyi - so this is my new map project. It's a bunch of things, but mostly, a 3D map of aircraft around given airports, as well as the weather, ATIS, and other data sources visualized in 3D and unique ways. Like most of the stuff I build, it's got no real use, but I think it's neat. If you like planes, check out the CYYZ/KJFK map, weather, and runway tabs - I put the most work into that. Also any feature requests, questions, comments, etc are always appreciated!
Dec 2025 · planes.fyi
- 8YT
2015 · yepjet.com
- 9AC
I got tired of checking into my flight exactly 24 hours before it departs, so I built a bot to do it for me. Enjoy!
2023 · swcheckinbot.com
- 10MN
http://flightlite.com Flightlite is a visual flight tracker combining 3D and overhead views and flight information. It is my first launch since I started reading Hacker News and was developed as a side project for the past 6 months or so. I made the final push on it this morning to get it to a semi-launchable state. - The best coverage is US and UK - Sometimes the data I get is a bit crazy (spent a lot of effort to correct/sanitise it but it's not perfect) - Doesn't work in IE 64bit or Linux due to Google Earth not being available I'm now trying to work out how to take this further, if there…
2010
- 11AS
I've been living in Denver for a few years and the prices for simple airport rides are kind of crazy. In an effort to build/expand community - I built Airport Swap. It is a platform to exchange rides to/from the airport _for free_. Give a ride to get a ride! Airport Swap is was built with the intention of building (or finding) community or relying on a circle of trust to choose drivers/riders (friends of friends pretty much). Connecting people on their street, in their building, or from a board game group they attended before is the goal. Looking for any feedback :) Cheers!
Mar 2026 · airportswap.com
- 12HA
2013 · hackerairlines.com
- 13WG
http://viajando.us A little background: I'm from Brazil. In Brazil we speak Portuguese (PT-BR!). "viajando" could be translated to "traveling" or "travel to". I was blown away by the new interface google provided for flight search. I mean, Hipmunk in itself proposed a new, unique, and novel way that (at least in my opinion) completely changed the landscape of how flight search should be done. But when google stepped in, it proposed an almost instant manner for me to see flights, repeat searches, put in adjustments and what-not. The simplicity of it was also something that got me itching...…
2011
- 14
- 15MM
Many years ago (2007?) I put together this site: http://www.tripzard.com . I never launched it, because it was basically a MVP/POC so it's not very refined, but I just found it again today and was surprised it still kind of works decent. The idea was kind of like "Find Your Spot" where you answer a bunch of questions about what you like to do when you travel, and it calculates where the best places for your to travel would be. Most people I found don't realize there are some interesting options out there instead of just going to Cancun. What does the HN community think, is this a project…
2011
- 16FF
2013 · flightowl.net
- 17MF
I needed to get out of localhost:3000 land and ship a (somewhat functional) web app. Anyways, I built Current Ride as a place to put your bucket list items out in the open. The goal is really to inspire the community to do more things! Building the app helped me understand Rails a lot better and allowed me to hack-break-fix bugs/features more effectively :) Enjoy! http://www.currentride.com
2012
- 18IM
Hi HN, Since I was a kid, I have always been fascinated by the flight display screens at the airport wondering where I can fly direct if I had an open ticket There are more than 38 million commercial flights per year departing from +3,200 airports and served by +580 airlines! So much data that can be summarized and made accessible to everyone in an easy and convenient interface. Today, I’m releasing Direct flights, a tool to explore all non-stop flights from any airport: https://direct-flights.com/ # How it's made? The frontend is built on React - using a server-side rendering…
2019
- 19ND
Hi HN, I'm happy to finally ship my first development project: http://favsi.com. Favsi is a site to share lists of random stuff. Things you probably wouldn't post anywhere else. Like: • Favorite cheesy ninja movies • Favorite original NES games • Favorite songs to sing in the car There's been lots of list-type apps cropping up lately: Bagcheck, ListGeeks, Listry, and probably others. Mini-trend? Some Background: By trade, I've been mostly a business guy [shudders] at startups, but have been working to change that for awhile now. I started learning Ruby a few times last year but had trouble…
2011
- 20RS
During Christmas 2025, I found myself burnt out from work. The last few years had been hard, and multiple redundancies saw the company I loved reduce down to just a handful of remaining staff. As a coping mechanism, I kinda disassociated for a while - throwing myself into my personal projects. AI was destroying the passion I had for coding. I tried to find some meaning in development again. After months of throwing myself into creating this game, I slowly fell back in love with coding. I taught myself a bunch of technologies that I was previously unfamiliar - Astro, Flask, Redis, Celery,…
Jul 2026 · replicant.space
- 21CA
I built this because I was tired of creating pull requests in 20 repositories just to change a single line of workflow job version. With Infra as AI, just mention the change. Agents work on all repos in parallel, read the docs, make a bunch of PRs and fill in the description. You can see the demo of the actual dashboard in the landing. Let me know your thoughts :) It means a lot to me!
Sep 2025 · infrastructureas.ai
- 22AW
Feb 2026 · autoliner.app
- 23
- 24NF
Two weeks ago I posted a link to my side project (http://flightlite.com) and got some great feedback from HNers. I've spent a lot of time tweaking and improving based on that and I'm really happy with the result - it's much more usable and useful now! What's better: - reduced complexity of the main tracking page based on feedback from #veb - new search functionality (auto-completion, blended all search types into one search box) - thanks #robyates for your input - failover to large Google Maps view if Google Earth isn't installed with prompt and link to install from - added a proper 404 page…
2011
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