About Hobbstack

Our Mission

Aviation operations software hasn't kept up with the rest of the world. Flight schools still juggle spreadsheets, whiteboards, and legacy platforms that charge more as they grow — and the same tools either ignore aircraft partnerships and solo owners entirely or force them into a school-shaped workflow that doesn't fit. Hobbstack was built to change that: a single, offline-first platform that handles scheduling, fleet management, billing, maintenance, logbook, currency tracking, weather briefing, dispatch chaining, and a flight wizard that works without signal, all at a price that doesn't punish growth.

Why now

The aviation-operations software market consolidated through the late 2010s and early 2020s — independent platforms acquired by private-equity rollups, then the typical post- acquisition pattern: pricing hikes, feature gates moved up- tier, and product velocity slowed. Modern web infrastructure now makes it viable for a small independent team to ship a complete alternative without that creep: PostgreSQL on Railway, a React Native codebase that targets iPhone, Android, and desktop from a single source, and Stripe Connect for payment orchestration. The cost structure of legacy aviation software no longer reflects the cost of building it. That gap is where Hobbstack lives.

Built for pilots, by an engineer obsessed with the workflow

Hobbstack is built around the daily rhythm of a flight school: the morning dispatch, the squawk sheet, the hobbs meter approaching 100-hour service. The same patterns scale down cleanly to a flying club's monthly cost-share, a partnership's shared-aircraft schedule, or a solo owner's personal logbook and maintenance forecast. Every feature is designed to reduce friction on the flight line and in the office, so your team can focus on flying.

Offline-first, modern architecture

Hobbstack is built offline-first for pilots at remote airfields with no signal. The flight wizard, schedule, and fleet data are cached locally and sync automatically when connectivity returns. Powered by a React Native frontend that works on iPhone, Android, and desktop as a progressive web app, and a Python backend with real-time conflict detection, automated billing, dispatch chaining, smart weather briefing, and predictive maintenance forecasting. Secure authentication using httpOnly JWT cookies, capability-based permissions, and encrypted data at rest.

Fair pricing

You only pay for aircraft and simulators. Members, instructors, and students are unlimited at every tier — no per-user surcharges, no platform markup on Stripe payments (you pay Stripe's standard rate directly, we take nothing on top), no surprise invoices. Organization pricing scales smoothly with your fleet, from Solo at $19/mo for a single shared aircraft, up to $619/mo for fifty on Pro (and from $899/mo for Enterprise — 51+ aircraft, SSO/SAML, white-label email, and a custom SLA). Personal flying outside any organization — your logbook, your currency, your weather briefings, and weight-and-balance for one personally-owned aircraft — stays free, forever, on the Free Personal tier. We believe software should get more effective as you grow, not more expensive.

Your data stays yours. Export the entire dataset (logbook, aircraft, billing, members) as CSV, PDF, or JSON at any time, with one click. No lock-in, no “contact sales to export,” and our public REST API is included on every paid tier.

Meet the founder

Ryan McAfee

Founder & Engineer

I'm Ryan — active-duty Air Force, stationed at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa since 2019. By day I work in PMEL. By evenings and weekends I've been building Hobbstack and working toward my private pilot certificate at the on-base aero club, which is the flight line I watched the closest while designing the product. That habit of calibrating things to a measurable standard is the same habit I built Hobbstack with — the Hobbs and tach math, the weight-and-balance arithmetic, the currency- window calculations all have to be exactly right or the product is worse than a paper logbook. Hobbstack is what I wished existed for the operations I saw running on spreadsheets and paper dispatch boards.

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The math has to be exactly right, or the product is worse than a paper logbook.

If you want to talk shop — engineering, aviation, or anything Hobbstack — reach me at support@hobbstack.com.