Building the world’s most-loved flight tracker

Vertical: Technology

Mercury products: Treasury, IO, Quickbooks integration, Payroll, Bill Pay

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Flighty is the app that airlines wish they’d built first. Its small, globally distributed team has turned a notoriously opaque part of travel — knowing what's actually happening with a flight — into a product used by more than 4 million people, including pilots and crew who prefer it to their own airline's tools.

In 2015, Ryan Jones was working in operations at Apple when a six-hour delay at Fort Lauderdale left him stranded at an airport Chili’s with nothing but frustration and a hunch. “I just knew the airline waited to officially delay it,” Jones has said of the airline. “If I’d had the time that morning, I could have gone to the FAA website, looked at the air traffic, looked at the weather, and I could have figured all this out.” The data existed. Nobody was putting it in the hands of the people who needed it most.

Jones tweeted that he was going to build the solution himself. Within hours, he had 40 replies. The three cofounders who still work on Flighty today came from that thread — they had never seen, known, interacted with each other before then. After 18 months of beta testing with frequent flyers and commercial pilots, Flighty launched in August 2019 — and was named an App Store Editor's Choice within days.

Today, a Flighty user is on 3 out of every 4 flights in the U.S., and delivers delay predictions powered by machine learning — often hours before airlines notify passengers. The team behind it: about ten people, spread across seven countries and five time zones.

Running a profitable, data-heavy subscription app across continents has its own kind of operational complexity. Aviation data vendors, international contractors, Apple’s App Store fees, infrastructure costs — the financial surface area looks more like a mid-stage startup than a bootstrapped indie shop. Every dollar matters when there’s no outside capital to cushion a bad quarter, and every payment needs to land on time regardless of which country it’s heading to.

Jones was also handling all accounting and billpay, which included going to physical bank branches on a monthly basis to process large wire transactions. For a founder, it was far from an ideal usage of time.

Flighty’s biggest category of recurring spend is data. Aviation feeds, infrastructure providers, and contractors stretching from Barcelona to Oslo — the bills that keep the product alive arrive in euros and Norwegian kroner more often than dollars. For most of Flighty’s life as a bootstrapped business, that meant a specific kind of friction.

The default way American banks handle international payments is to send USD and let the receiving party absorb the conversion. That sounds tidy until the vendor in Spain comes back asking why the amount that landed is short of what they invoiced, or a contractor in Norway has to involve their own bank to chase down a wire that arrived in the wrong currency. Foreign banks would also frequently silently reject wires, and then impose a 5% fee for receiving USD and tacking on a 2% conversion fee. The mechanics shift the work — and the friction — to the people Flighty is paying.

Mercury sends the amount in the recipient's local currency, with the conversion happening at the source. Vendors get the exact figure they invoiced. Contractors don’t have to flag mismatches or coordinate with their banks. Flighty knows the dollar cost before the wire goes out, with no opaque transaction or FX markup surfacing weeks later in reconciliation.

Without venture capital on the balance sheet, every financial decision carries real weight. Flighty has been profitable and growing, but profitability at this scale demands discipline.

The company parks idle funds in Mercury Treasury, earning yield on cash that would otherwise sit dormant between payroll, vendor payments, and App Store revenue deposits. Auto-transfer rules move money between the operating account and Treasury on a set schedule, so the discipline runs itself. Predictable inflows and lumpy outflows — including data vendor contracts and annual software licenses — leave consistent gaps. Yield earned in those gaps adds up.

Jones doesn't mince words about Flighty’s growth philosophy: build features people want to share, and let the product do the marketing. And it seems to be working – Flighty has never done marketing and boasts top-decile retention rates. That discipline means every operating expense gets scrutiny. The team issues individual team credit cards through Mercury IO mapped to specific vendors and cost categories — infrastructure, software tools, subscriptions. When a subscription auto-renews or a vendor raises pricing, the team sees it in real time rather than discovering it during reconciliation.

Flighty doesn’t have a CFO or a dedicated finance team, but still needs accurate financials — for tax obligations across multiple jurisdictions, for understanding true unit economics on each subscriber, and for making informed decisions about when to hire, when to invest in a new data source, or when to say no to an initiative that doesn't pencil out.

Mercury’s QuickBooks integration syncs transactions, vendor payments, and card activity directly into the ledger, cutting the manual reconciliation work that bogs down small teams at month-end. Payroll runs from the same operating account that handles everything else, which removes one more reconciliation surface. For a company handling subscription revenue from millions of users plus vendor payments in foreign currencies, the alternative — manual GL categories of hundreds of line items — would be a meaningful time sink. Automated syncing keeps the books current, which means the team can look at real numbers when making real decisions rather than waiting for a monthly close to catch up.

Flighty’s financial setup today:

• International vendor and contractor payments sent in the recipient’s local currency, with no markup or downstream coordination
• Auto-transfer rules moving idle cash into Treasury without manual intervention
• Per-vendor team credit cards keeping spend categorized at the moment of authorization
• Payroll and operating spend running from a single account
• Automated QuickBooks sync keeping financials current without a dedicated finance function

For Jones, Flighty’s current financial setup is built to last. By reducing manual friction, the team can remain focused on what they do best: building the world’s most-loved flight tracker.

Flighty is a Mercury perks partner. Get six free months of Flighty Pro here.