The flight API we wanted to use.
FlightByte was never planned as a product. It was the missing piece of one, and it turned out to be the piece everyone else was missing too.
Where it began
It started inside an airport transfer service. A driver has to be at the right door at the right moment, which means the software behind them has to know, reliably, when a passenger’s flight lands, slips by forty minutes, or quietly moves to another gate.
Every flight data provider we tried answered the easy question, what is the status right now, and walked away from the hard ones.
What was left to us
The status code came with a to-do list.
- How often to askEvery minute burns money; every hour misses the gate change.
- What actually changedTwo JSON blobs, forty fields, one new gate somewhere in the middle.
- Which flight you meanTK1 is SAW–AMS in the morning and IST–JFK in the afternoon.
- What to do at 03:00Your endpoint is down, the flight has landed, and nobody is watching the retry.
We wrote all of it once, for ourselves. Then we noticed every team around us was writing it again.
A lookup, a subscription, and a signed webhook for every change. That is the whole API.
We pulled the watching, diffing and delivering out of our own product, gave it an honest surface, and opened it. Nothing in it exists because a roadmap asked for it.
Why the orange
The “black box” is not black. It is painted international orange so that it can be found. It records everything a flight does, second by second, and it is the one account nobody argues with afterwards.
That is the job FlightByte has in your application: record everything a flight does, byte by byte, and hand it over in a form you can trust. The colour is there to remind us of the standard.
How we work
Docs before sales
No demo to book. A free key is a minute away, the API reference is public, and questions reach the people who wrote the code.
Honest at the edges
Ambiguous numbers get a 400 with the options. Unpublished flights sit as pending. Failing endpoints are suspended, not spammed.
Small on purpose
One product and a bias towards fewer features that hold up in production over more that look good in a screenshot.
Track your first flight tonight.
An API key, the docs, and two requests stand between you and your first webhook.
A free key in a minute, no card. On a paid plan? Request a key