
How I met my wife and why I built yet another flight price tracker - timtrippy
Hello world,<p>I am working on putting together the beta for http:&#x2F;&#x2F;TripFate.com and thought it might be a good idea to share the story and motivation behind it.<p>I met my wife exactly 4 years ago - all thanks to being on the right flight at the right time. Funny thing is, I wasn&#x27;t really supposed to be on that flight to Rome. As much as I loved traveling, I was a poor college student and I couldn&#x27;t really afford the expensive flights.<p>And then it happened. I was looking for flights to random destinations after wrapping up my project report at 4 AM, and I found a round-trip ticket to Rome (from NYC) for ~$110! It was crazy because the usual prices are at least in the $350-400 range.<p>I got super hooked! After I returned from my trip, I registered on a bunch of websites to get alerts if there was a price drop. I did get some good deals, but nothing was as crazy cheap as the one I had found for my trip to Rome.<p>Long story short, I created a service for myself over the years that&#x27;d look for flights from across the internet that really were &#x27;great&#x27; for their price. In the beginning, it simply sent API requests and had a bunch of if-else statements. However, over the years, I&#x27;ve added a bunch of Machine Learning and Deep Learning tricks to the algorithm.<p>Moreover, I have instances of my &#x27;smart travel finder&#x27; running on around 14 different servers around the world (who knew looking for a flight from India is cheaper sometimes!).<p>I started getting lots of really interesting flights: ~$170 round-trip to Cancun, ~$230 to Paris, ~$340 to India... and so I decided to share it with family and friends and friends of friends. Once the list grew to over 200, I thought maybe people would be interested in paying for the service, and that&#x27;s how http:&#x2F;&#x2F;TripFate.com was born.
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pizza
Seems down for me

edit: well this is weird, it seems accessible through a SOCKS proxy

Looks cool! I might suggest making it very clear upfront that it is an email
based service - I didn't read much of the copy before signing up and was
expecting there to be a search UI. Cool tool.

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timtrippy
Oh cool! Thanks! Yeah, I think I need to make that more clear. Do you think
having a 30 second explainer video would help?

