Built so families stop overpaying for flights.
FlyCheap Tracker is a private fare-watching dashboard that polls 1,000+ airlines 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.
01How it works
- Pick a route + dates. Add JFK→CAI on July 7, or anything else — any 3-letter IATA pair works.
- We poll every 5 minutes. A scheduler fans the search out to Travelpayouts (Aviasales), Duffel, and Google Flights via SerpAPI and SearchAPI in parallel. Cheapest result wins.
- Three alert kinds, instant. Threshold-cross (below your target), price-drop (≥ N% below the 7-day median), and the mistake-fare detector (≥ 3σ below the 30-day mean — the genuine glitches that get pulled within 90 minutes).
- You decide when to book. We never charge cards. Every deal links straight to the airline / OTA.
02What makes it different
- Multi-provider fan-out. One search hits four live data providers in parallel. Cheaper than any single OTA quote.
- Mistake-fare detector. Statistical anomaly detection over your route's real history — the kind of fares that disappear in under an hour.
- Buy / Hold / Wait recommender. Per-search z-score + 14-day trend slope. We don't just show the price; we tell you whether to act.
- Ask FarePilot. Voice + chat concierge with full read access to your dashboard. “Cheapest week in August under $700/adult?” — she queries and answers.
- Flex ±3 days. Every tracked search shows the cheapest pairing within a 3-day window on either side — often saves hundreds.
- Calendar export. One click drops the cheapest fare's outbound + return + a 24h reminder into your iCal.
03Who we are
Built and run by a small team out of 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. The only outbound calls we make are to the airline / OTA APIs the deals come from. We do earn affiliate commission on bookings — see how we make money below.
04Privacy & security
- Code-based sign-in only — no passwords stored.
- Cookies are
httpOnly+Secure+SameSite=Lax; sessions auto-rotate every 30 days. - Every admin action is recorded in an audit log (who / what / when / diff / IP).
- No credit card data ever touches our servers — Stripe and PayPal handle billing entirely.
05How we make money — affiliate partnerships
FlyCheap's free tier is genuinely free. 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 (1,000+ airline flight metasearch), Hotellook (hotel comparison), and WayAway (cashback flights). Our primary data source for fare polling.
- Trip.com — major OTA, especially competitive on Asia routes. Appears in our “Book →” dropdown and hotel suggestions.
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 Tracker earns commission on bookings made through our partner links — at no extra cost to you.