Built so families stop overpaying for flights.
FlyCheap is a private fare-watching dashboard that polls airline fares through live partner APIs and alerts you the moment a price drops below your target. Here is exactly how it works, who runs it, and how it makes money.
How it works
- Pick a route + dates. Add JFK→CAI on July 7, or anything else — any 3-letter IATA pair works.
- A scheduler runs continuously. Each time it wakes it fans the routes that are due out to the fare providers enabled right now — Travelpayouts (Aviasales) — and the cheapest valid offer wins. How often a given route is due depends on how much it matters — close to departure, close to your target, or moving fast means more often.
- Two alert triggers. Threshold-cross (the fare lands at or below your target) and price-drop (the fare falls more than your drop percentage below the route's own recent median — you set the percentage in Settings). Alerts go out by Email on Free and by Email, SMS and Telegram on paid plans.
- You decide when to book. We never charge cards. Every deal links straight to the airline / OTA.
What makes it different
- Provider fan-out. 6 provider integrations are built in; the ones enabled in Settings are searched in parallel and the cheapest valid offer wins. Every fare snapshot is tagged with the provider it came from.
- Buy / Hold / Wait verdict. Plain rules over your route's own history (where today's fare sits against its median, and which way it is trending) blended with a small model trained nightly on our polling data. Every verdict shows its inputs on the Model page.
- Ask FarePilot. Voice + chat concierge with read access to your dashboard. “Cheapest week in August under $700/adult?” — it queries your data and answers.
- Date windows. A watch can be an exact pair of dates or a departure window with a range of trip lengths; we price the pairings inside it and surface the cheapest.
- Calendar export. One click drops the cheapest fare's outbound + return + a 24h reminder into your iCal.
Who we are
Built and run by Myron Mekhael, sole proprietor, in New York. The original use case was an annual family trip to Cairo where we kept missing the good fares; the watchlist + alerting layer became valuable enough to share, so here it is.
No banner ads. No selling your data. No third-party tracking pixels — usage analytics are first-party. The Privacy Policy names every outside service that sees any of your data (fare providers, email, billing, the AI assistant). We do earn affiliate commission on bookings — see how we make money below.
Privacy & security
- Code-based sign-in only — no passwords stored.
- Cookies are
httpOnly+Secure+SameSite=Lax; a session expires after 30 days, and an optional device cookie lets you skip the code for 90 days. - Admin actions are recorded in an audit log (who / what / when / old and new values / IP).
- No credit card data ever touches our servers — Stripe and PayPal handle billing entirely.
How we make money — affiliate partnerships
FlyCheap's free tier is genuinely free (5 tracked routes, no card). Beyond subscriptions, we partner with a handful of established travel booking sites — when you click a “Book →” button and complete a booking on their site, they pay us a small commission.
You pay exactly the same priceas if you visited the booking site directly — the commission comes out of the booking site's margin, not your wallet. This is the same model used by Wirecutter, NerdWallet, and most price-comparison tools.
Our current partners
- Travelpayouts — the affiliate network behind Aviasales (flights), Hotellook (hotels), WayAway (cashback flights), EKTA (travel insurance) and Kiwitaxi (airport transfers). Also our primary data source for fare polling.
- Trip.com Partners — flight and hotel bookings.
Stays: hotel links go through Hotellook (Travelpayouts) and Trip.com, which pay a commission. Airbnb and Vrbo have no partner programme — those buttons are plain, prefilled searches that earn us nothing; we include them because many travelers prefer homes to hotels.
Note: Skyscanner appears in our cross-shop dropdown as a price-comparison option, but we are not currently in their affiliate programme — clicks to Skyscanner earn us nothing. We show it because the price comparison is useful to you.
What this means for you
- Every booking link routes through our redirect endpoint
/go, which logs the click for accounting and adds partner identifiers to the destination URL. - We do not manipulate fare rankings to favor any partner. The cheapest cached price wins; partner choice is yours.
- You can always book directly with the airline — we include EgyptAir.com, Google Flights, etc. as non-affiliate comparison options. We never hide direct booking.
- More detail in our Privacy Policy — the “Sharing” section covers exactly what each partner sees.
FTC disclosure: FlyCheap earns commission on bookings made through our partner links — at no extra cost to you.