Flight Compare

Cash fares from Google Flights and award prices from airline programs, side by side. A free desktop app for macOS and Windows that runs on your own Pomerado account.

• Searches Google Flights for cash fares and American and Delta for award prices at the same time.
• Shows each site's results as soon as that site finishes.
• Lines up the same flight across sites, so a cash fare and its award price sit on one row.
• Shows cents per point when a flight has both prices for the same trip.
• Opens every result on its source site, so you can check it and book it there.

Download

Get the latest .dmg (macOS) or .exe (Windows) from this repository's Releases page.

The downloads are not signed with a developer certificate, because the app is open source and free. Your computer warns you the first time you open it.

Open it on a Mac

1. Open the .dmg and drag Flight Compare into Applications.
2. Open Flight Compare. macOS says it can't check the app. Click Done.
3. Open System Settings, then Privacy & Security.
4. Scroll to Security. Next to the message about Flight Compare, click Open Anyway.
5. Confirm with your password or Touch ID, then click Open.

macOS remembers this, so the warning shows only once. On macOS 14 or earlier you can instead Control-click the app in Applications, choose Open, then click Open.

If macOS says the app is damaged, run this once in Terminal, then open it again:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Flight Compare.app"

Open it on Windows

1. Run the installer.
2. Windows SmartScreen says it protected your PC. Click More info.
3. Click Run anyway.

The zip download runs without installing. Unzip it and open Flight Compare.exe, then follow the same two clicks.

First run

Flight Compare runs its searches on your own Pomerado account. Setup takes about two minutes.

1. Create a free Pomerado account. The free plan includes 100 runs a day.
2. Make a key. The app opens Pomerado's key form already filled in. Click Create and copy the key.
3. Paste the key into the app.

Each site in a search uses one run. When you run out, the app says when your runs come back and links to Pomerado Premium, which gives you 1,000 runs a day.

How your key is kept

• The key is encrypted with your system keychain (Electron safeStorage) and never written in plain text. On Linux without a keychain, it stays in memory until you close the app.
• Only the app's main process holds the key and calls Pomerado. The window gets job handles, never the key or job ids.
• The app only starts read-only runs (POST /v1/runs/read-only), so it never changes a website.
• Settings, then Disconnect, deletes the key.

How results are ranked

One visible rule, with no hidden scoring:

• Flights with a cash fare come first, lowest fare first.
• Flights with only an award price follow, fewest points first.
• Ties go to fewer stops, then shorter flights, then earlier departures.
• The best pick is the lowest cash fare. A second pick shows the flight whose points go furthest.
• Every price is a total for all passengers. Google Flights quotes the whole party; award sites quote miles and taxes per passenger, which the app multiplies by the passenger count.
• Cents per point is (cash fare - award taxes) / points, shown only when both prices are for the same one-way trip and the taxes are in the fare's currency.
• With a return date, every site lists outbound flights with a starting price for the whole round trip, and no return flight is picked yet. The app labels these "Round trip" and shows no cents per point. American states each row's price scope; a one-way scope is labelled "Outbound only".

Sites

The sites are public Pomerado tools, listed in src/shared/tools.ts. Each has a one-way tool and a round-trip tool. United's award search is in the list but turned off while its tool is rebuilt. It needs a United login, which the run asks for on Pomerado's own page.

Each tool has its own result shape. src/shared/flights.ts has one normalizer per tool, written against that tool's output_schema from GET /v1/tools/{id}.

Development

Flight Compare is built on pomerado-app-kit, which it expects in a sibling folder for now.

git clone https://github.com/Pomerado/pomerado-app-kit
git clone https://github.com/Pomerado/flight-compare
(cd pomerado-app-kit && npm install && npm run build)
cd flight-compare
npm install
npm run dev

Node 22.12 or later. Electron downloads on first launch.

Without an account

npm run fake-api starts a local stand-in for Pomerado's API with made-up results. In the app's Settings, set the API address to http://127.0.0.1:4010/v1, then connect with the key it prints.

To point the app at another Pomerado environment, change the API and Dashboard addresses in Settings. Changing the API address disconnects your key.

Tests

npm run typecheck
npm run test:unit      # normalizers and ranking
npm run test:e2e       # the built app, driven by Playwright against the fake API
npm run screenshots    # docs/screenshots at 390 and 1440 px wide

On Linux without a display, run the Playwright commands under xvfb-run -a.

Release builds

Pushing a tag such as v0.1.0 runs .github/workflows/release.yml, which builds the macOS (dmg, zip) and Windows (nsis, zip) downloads without a developer certificate and attaches them to a draft release. The Mac app gets only the ad-hoc signature that Apple Silicon needs to run it at all. Locally, npm run dist:mac or npm run dist:win.

Layout

Path	What it holds
src/main	Electron main process: the window and the kit's Pomerado bridge
src/preload	Exposes window.pomerado to the window
src/renderer	The screen: form, site status, best pick, table and cards
src/shared/copy.ts	Every word the app shows
src/shared/tools.ts	Sites and their tool ids
src/shared/flights.ts	Each site's result as one FlightOption shape
src/shared/rank.ts	Lining up and ranking
test/fake-api	The local stand-in for Pomerado's API

License

MIT