I make $8k/year sending cheap flight alert emails | Hacker News Reader

I make $8k/year sending cheap flight alert emails

phillyflightlist.com

110 pointspogansrun46 comments

Article title is inaccurate: this project gets 8K in revenue per year but has almost no profit.

"Tech" company "business models" do not require actual profits.

You have trivialized and left out the most important part of this: "If it is growing at hypergrowth pace and has a huge multi-billion dollar market."

Actual profits only get in the way of "Tech" company "business models"

That sounds like an investment opportunity for SoftBank.

https://www.standard.co.uk/business/softbank-record-20-billi...

Tiger Global would be in a very close running for biggest losses

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonkochkodin/2022/11/08/mor...

> has almost no profit

It makes too much money for either of your backers.

  Most people spend $3 per day on coffee, so why not $3 per month for the heads up on flights that are hundreds of dollars off regular fares?

I dont find the comparison very compelling. If I can save more per year than I pay, it's a good deal. In that vein, I'd like to see how my travel habits could be accommodated by the info the newsletter provides. If I believe it's a fit, I'd happily pay the money.

I seriously doubt most people spend $1000/year on coffee. Many, maybe, but definitely not most.

If a bag of quality beans is $15 and you go through one a week, you’re most of the way there.

How big is this $15 bag of coffee that you finish in a week? Here in New Zealand a standard 200g bag of beans from a good roastery is no more than $10 NZD, about $6 USD.

maybe 12oz, but this is high quality, not at all like the stuff you would get in Wellington

Pretty standard in the PNW: https://www.olympiacoffee.com/collections/coffee/products/mo...

San Francisco and the Bay Area will also easily charge $20 for sometimes even just 12 ounces of beans. Pretty wild, but IMHO San Francisco has some of the best cafes, baristas, and actual drinks. I moved to Southern California and it's still good and they charge almost as much too but still not as good.

In my area, the cheaper end of quality beans is roughly $1/1oz, so 200g would be $7 (Though, I find beans are usually sold 12oz (340g) per package). Personally, a 12oz bag last me roughly 2 weeks, but I only drink 1 cup per day.

I don't doubt that some people will spend as much, that's not hard. My point is that most definitely don't. Most people don't buy $15 bags every week. Hell, instant coffee is something like 20% of the whole market by revenue, and considering how cheap it is compared to quality coffee, I think there are more people who drink Folgers than those who spend $1000/year on coffee.

Probably not globally but if you restrict your focus to working age adults in America (the people who might be using this service) then it is not far off . The average American does spend about $1000 on coffee per year[1], which is probably where the author is getting this figure. The caveat is of course that this skews to fancy drinks with sugar injections and whipped cream, but close enough. https://www.renolon.com/coffee-spending-statistics/ [1]

I think those figures are wrong. Here's another source, suggesting the spending is $250 per capita, and 90% of that spending is out of home. This necessarily implies that people who spend more than a few hundred dollars per year on coffee beans, like some replies suggested, are a tiny minority.

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/hot-drinks/coffee/unite...

I spend about 10/ a week on coffee for 2. Drip brew so seems low for latte folks. Starbucks latte is like 6$ now or something

It’s unbelievable amusing that this is the thread people are pulling on :)

I certainly don’t use this coffee comparison in the actual marketing. I anchor the price against the average per ticket savings and sometimes compare it to “less than the cost of a checked bag”

Thanks for your reply - it's funny because my comment, which led with a nitpick about the logic of "you spend x on y so spend p<<x on q", then apparently triggered a debate about whether people actually bought that much coffee :)

Maybe what I should have led with is that it would be nice (from my perspective) to know when your info most often leads to savings, so one can decide if that matches their travel needs/wants. It looks to be like you're targeting people who can be flexible about dates and destination; this is useful info to set expectations for how best to use the information

Agreed— good thought!

I find this to be a good approach if done properly. It definitely should be done visually eg. checkout/pricing should contain visual comparison (actual coffee). That should really put things in perspective.

Most people spend $3 per day on coffee, so why not sell them coffee?

Sorry, could not help myself :-)

Now that this hit the front page, I’ve had dozens of people who signed up asking me why they can’t find flights from San Francisco

I'm pretty sure Scott's Cheap Flights[1] makes a good deal more. It's going to be hard to have a big enough audience if you limit yourself to only one city.

[1] https://scottscheapflights.com/

Yes SCF make at least $10M per year now probably. Like I mentioned below theres a ton of other ones like dollar flight club, jacks flight club, nextvacay, mighty travels, etc. It’s not a new biz model, just very niched to one market.

Money from this is dwarfed by my day job income so I’d be happy with $1,000 per month

Scott's Cheap Flights has basically become a lifestyle brand. Really disappointed in it (I see they don't even advertise their pricing) after they moved regular economy deals up to their 'elite' tier, which is at least hundreds of dollars IIRC. I don't want to pay for your blog spam.

I guess the moral of the story is, simple email updates don't pay (enough).

This service was pretty sweet until around when the pandemic hit and then they stopped serving flights that didn't originate out of the USA which was really annoying. I don't know if they brought that back up yet but it was enough for me to give the service up. Is there anything comparable?

You'd think that this is the kind of thing which would be insanely easy to automate.

I’ve seen a few companies come and go in the last few years who tried to automate it and failed. It seems people are really paying for the sense of curation and review, since what makes something a “good deal” can’t always be measured by a computer. Or maybe people just like their flight alerts wrapped in a friendly and helpful tone, and the tech gurus who can program it aren’t adept enough at copywriting. I’m just thinking out loud. I’m curious to hear others thoughts on programmatic vs human selected

I thought yours is automated too. How do you do it manually? Go through various airline websites daily to see what they've got to offer?

Yeah that's actually a good point, I was thinking that what would probably be useful is a system of collecting the data first and then from there curating it.

This is US only, found out only at 3rd step of registration after already confirming email when they asked me to select US airport.

Absolutely horrible website btw. now I am trying to close account, when I tap on profile it asks me for airport and can't do anything without filling airport and then after filling it I find out there is no automated way to close account when you check the options.

I'm curious how they generate the content, how much work is involved in getting the leads on cheap flights, is it automated? It seems like a good thing if it's mostly automated, but if it takes 35 hours a week of someone searching for deals it's not so much.

It’s about 4 hours per week of work between vetting flights, writing the flight alerts, and managing the admin

scottscheapflights + hyper localized marketing

Yes exactly. There’s a million other ones too like dollar flight club, jacks flight club, nextvacay, mighty travels, etc. it’s not a new concept just very niched to one market

You said you spend leftover money on advertising. Could you tell us a bit more about it? What methods are you using to promote it?

Why doing it only for flights departing PHL instead of generalizing the system to other airports?

they're leaving room for the rest of us ;)

It just takes too much time and effort to keep it up for multiple audiences. It’s not automated — it’s all about the curation. There are plenty of similar sites that cover many more airports though

I'm sure it could easily be automated with Python/Django and periodic scraping tasks and then ramped up for the rest of the US.

You must work with clean data sources. :)

This is the naive approach you would do 15+ years ago.

Then things got way better with real browser engines like Webkit that could understand Javascript. That was something that I've personally hacked together as a contractor for an anti-piracy customer using Python, Webkit and Qt framework (PyQt) in around 2009. Shortly after some nice libraries in node/js came out like Phantom.js which would make this much better.

If I were to do this today, I'd use Playwright.

how is this different from the cheapest option that I can find on Google Flight?

It is not, but this is easier because somebody with knowledge about airfare curates the deals for you and sends them to you inbox.

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