I got my first paying customer today

Hey everyone

I'm a private pilot and software engineer, and for the past year or so I've been building PreflightAPI — a REST API that serves US aviation data sourced from official FAA and NOAA sources.

I recently soft-launched after getting the project to MVP status and functional enough for others to use, and have been doing some cold outreach the past week. Well today I checked my stripe dashboard and sure enough I got my first paying customer who decided that my $50/month plan was worth the price. This was exactly the kind of validation that I needed after a year of 3am nights and long weekends. Actually received an email from him saying "It's one of those "just take my frikkin money" products" AND a bug report in the same email haha. It's a weird feeling knowing you now have someone that is using your product for something their building and willing to pay for it.

This actually started as the backend for a separate flight planning side project of mine that needed all of this data. What I quickly realized was that while all of this data is technically public, getting it in a usable form is a whole different story. You're hunting down half a dozen different sources, each with its own file format and schema — CSVs from here, XML from there, GeoJSON from somewhere else, PDFs from another place. Each dataset updates on a different schedule (some every few minutes, some every 28 or 56 days), so it's not enough to just parse it once — you need cron jobs to keep everything current. And for some of it, like NOTAMs, you have to literally email the FAA to request API access.

I figured if I had to go through this much work just to get the data I needed, surely other developers have hit (or will hit) the same wall. So I decided to offer the infrastructure I'd already built as a service — lower the barrier to entry for anyone who wants to build something aviation-related without spending months on data pipelines first.

Here's some of the data provided through my API:

• Weather: METARs, TAFs, AIRMETs/SIGMETs, PIREPs, winds aloft
• Airports: General info, contact details, runways, radio frequencies
• Airspace: Controlled (Class B, C, D) and special use (MOAs, alert, warning, prohibited, restricted) with full geospatial boundaries
• NOTAMs by airport, route, geographic radius, or keyword search
• Obstacles: 625,000+ FAA-charted towers, antennas, cranes, etc.
• Documents: Chart supplements, airport diagrams, instrument approach charts, DPs, STARs
• Nav Log Generation: VFR navigation logs using real wind forecasts, magnetic declination data, and automatic top-of-climb/descent calculation
• Route Weather Briefings: Full composite briefing (METARs, TAFs, SIGMETs, AIRMETs, PIREPs, NOTAMs) along a flight route
• E6B Utilities: Density altitude, pressure altitude, ground speed, crosswind components, true airspeed, and more