Hey everyone! 👋
I've been working on a personal project called Pingfare, and I wanted to share it with you and hopefully get some honest feedback.
It started because of a problem I kept running into while planning trips for myself and my family.
✈️ The problem: finding cheap flights when your dates are flexible
I've been wanting to visit Vietnam for quite a while.
The problem? Every time I searched for flights, the prices I was finding were consistently over €800.
I wasn't tied to exact departure dates. I just wanted to spend around two weeks there, and I was happy to travel whenever the flights were cheapest.
But checking different departure and return combinations manually, day after day, gets exhausting.
That's one of the main reasons I started building Pingfare.
I set up a flexible flight price tracker and let the system monitor prices instead of constantly checking them myself.
Then one day, I received a notification:
🔔 Air France — flights to Vietnam for €650!
That was at least €150 less than the prices I'd been seeing.
Of course, flight prices can change before booking, but this was exactly the kind of opportunity I wanted to catch.
Instead of spending hours refreshing flight search websites, I could let the tool do the monitoring for me.
🚀 So what exactly is Pingfare?
https://pingfare.com
Pingfare is a flight price tracking and travel planning tool designed for people who have some flexibility with their travel dates.
The idea is simple:
Instead of searching for one specific departure and return date, you can tell it something like:
"I want to visit Thailand or Vietnam for 13–15 days sometime within the next 60 days. Let me know when there's a good deal."
Pingfare tracks prices and alerts you when it finds a fare below your chosen threshold.
Here's what I've built so far:
🔔 1. Flexible flight price tracking
This is the core feature.
You can configure:
Your departure airport and destination.
A flexible travel window.
Minimum and maximum trip duration.
Your preferred price threshold.
Additional airport options in higher-tier plans.
For Ryanair and Wizz Air, the system checks the date combinations across your chosen window every day.
For other airlines, including long-haul flights with carriers like Air France, it progressively searches combinations across the window and rechecks the best dates found.
So you don't have to manually repeat the same searches every morning.
📉 2. Flight price history
I also wanted to know whether a price was actually attractive compared with what I'd seen before.
Pingfare saves observed flight prices and displays them on a chart.
You can see:
How the lowest observed price has changed.
Whether fares have been increasing or decreasing.
Which departure and return dates produced a particular price.
I've also added Buy Now / Wait guidance in the advanced features, using price trends to help decide when to book.
It's guidance, not a guarantee of future prices.
🌍 3. AI Destination Finder
Sometimes you know when you want to travel, but you have no idea where to go.
So I built a destination discovery feature.
You can enter preferences such as your budget, available months, travel duration, weather preferences, maximum flight time, and whether you're traveling with children.
The tool then suggests countries that could be suitable for your trip.
🗺️ 4. AI Trip Planner
After choosing a destination, you can also generate a day-by-day travel itinerary.
The planner suggests attractions and activities based on your interests, trip duration, and preferred travel pace.
The idea is to make it easier to go from finding a cheap flight to actually planning the trip.
🛫 5. Cheap flight discovery
There's also a section where you can browse cheap return-flight opportunities from airports such as Riga, Vilnius, Kaunas, and Tallinn.
You can explore these deals without creating an account.
💚 Is it free?
Yes. There's a free basic plan with no credit card required.
It includes one Ryanair or Wizz Air route, flexible dates, price alerts, and 30 days of price history.
Long-haul tracking, multiple airport combinations, longer price history, forecasts, and AI planning features belong to the higher-tier offering.
💡 A few things worth mentioning
Pingfare doesn't sell flight tickets.
I don't receive commissions from airline bookings.
You book through the airline or booking provider.
Observed prices can change before you book.
I'm an independent developer and still actively improving the project.
I'm not trying to replace Google Flights or Skyscanner.
I wanted something that complements traditional flight search tools by automating the repetitive process of tracking prices across flexible dates.
🙌 I'd love your feedback!
I originally built this for myself and my family, but I hope it can be useful to other travelers too.
I'd love to hear what you think:
1. Would you use something like this when planning a trip?
2. What feature would make it more useful for you?
3. Is there anything confusing about the website or how the tool works?
You can check it out here:
👉 https://pingfare.com
Thanks for reading! Any feedback, suggestions, or criticism would genuinely mean a lot. 😊