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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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

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.

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).

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