Health, home and travel decision
Going
A capable developer can build a useful flight-alert prototype (price monitoring + alerts) in ~1 week, but reproducing Going’s scale, curated mistake-fare sourcing, and mobile/user-base advantages is not realistic for a solo builder.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Users create/watch routes or airports → background job monitors fares → detection rules flag deals/mistakes → send email/push alerts with booking links → users book externally.
What it still won’t have
- Going’s historical deal database and tuned detection heuristics
- Mobile app distribution and existing user base
- Curated mistake-fare alerts and editorial curation
- Scale and reliability of millions of trackers
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 19 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal flight-deal alert service using Node.js + Postgres + a background worker (Bull or Sidekiq-like). In scope: (1) REST signup and watchlist API, (2) worker that polls a flight search API (e.g., Amadeus/Skyscanner) or scrapes Google Flights for configured routes, (3) price history storage in Postgres, (4) simple rule engine to detect >=20% drops or absolute thresholds and mark potential mistake fares, (5) send transactional emails via SendGrid and push notifications via Expo/Firebase, (6) single-page web UI to manage watchlist and view active deals, (7) error handling, retries, and unit tests for core components. Out of scope: mobile native apps, large-scale distributed scraping infrastructure, editorial curation, paid tier billing. Include logging, alerting for broken data sources, and automated tests for detection logic.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productGoing™ | Flight Alerts, Mistake Fares & Cheap Tickets
- official docsHow Going™ Works
- open sourceaffromero/flight-finder
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
