# How to Vibe Code Your Own Going (and Stop Paying for It)

> Flight Alerts, Mistake Fares & Cheap Tickets

- Site: https://going.com
- Category: Travel & Flight Alerts
- Platforms: Web app, iOS app, Android app
- Verdict: **Serious undertaking** (35/100 vibecodeable)
- Estimated effort: 6+ weeks of full-time development and data pipeline debugging

## Verdict

You can build a personal notification dashboard for a few airports, but the real challenge is continuously acquiring raw flight pricing data feeds.

Going relies on massive, continuous commercial airfare data streams and years of proprietary filtering logic to catch fleeting mistake fares. While you can spin up a web and React Native app shell using AI coding tools in a few weeks, your personal clone will stall out unless you build or pay for robust flight data pipelines. Furthermore, aggregating multi-region deals and wiring Apple and Google push notification certificates requires significant debugging friction.

### What you can't replicate

- Proprietary human-curated filtering rules honed over 13 years
- Commercial-grade global flight pricing data feeds
- Active community of over 2 million paying subscribers

## What it does

Going monitors commercial flight data to alert users about major price drops, heavily discounted routes, and mistake fares.

### Core features

- Flight deal ingestion engine
- Algorithmic filtering for price anomalies and mistake fares
- User preference settings (home airports and route regions)
- Email notification dispatch pipeline
- Push notification delivery for mobile clients
- Subscription tier management (Free vs Premium/Elite)

## The business

### Pricing

- Limited (Free): Free — Small sample of economy deals targeting continental US destinations.
- Premium: $49/yr — Targeting economy-class travel globally.
- Elite: $200/yr — Tailored for premium flyers seeking luxury deals.

Founded 2013.
Team size: 50+.

## The hard parts

- Acquiring low-latency, comprehensive global flight pricing data feeds without expensive commercial licensing
- Filtering thousands of daily price fluctuations to isolate genuine mistake fares without false positives
- Maintaining low-latency push notification delivery at scale across iOS and Android platforms

## How to vibe code Going

### Prerequisites

- Node.js (free): Required for running the Next.js web application and backend scripts.
- GitHub (free): Version control and deployment integration.
- Expo (free): Simplifies building and testing the React Native iOS and Android application.

### Recommended AI tools

- Claude Code: Best-in-class agentic coding tool for scaffolding full-stack features, database schemas, and data ingestion scripts across multiple directories.
- Cursor: Ideal AI-native editor for iterative UI polish on the React Native and web frontends.

### Stack

- Frontend: Next.js (Web) & Expo / React Native (iOS/Android)
- Backend: Next.js API Routes / Node.js background workers
- Database: Turso (SQLite at the edge)
- Auth: better-auth
- Payments: Stripe
- Other: Resend, OneSignal

### Hosting

- Vercel (Hosting the Next.js web dashboard and API endpoints): $0-20/mo
- Fly.io (Running background worker containers for continuous flight data ingestion and alert evaluation): $5-10/mo

### Build guide

1. **Project Scaffolding & Database Schema** — Initialize the monorepo structure with a Next.js web frontend and an Expo React Native mobile app. Set up Turso database with tables for users, home_airports, flight_deals, and user_alerts.

```
Scaffold a monorepo containing a Next.js app in /web, a backend worker service in /worker, and an Expo React Native app in /mobile. Configure Turso SQLite with Drizzle ORM. Create tables for users (id, email, subscription_tier), home_airports (id, user_id, airport_code), flight_deals (id, origin, destination, price, original_price, airline, departure_date, return_date, is_mistake_fare, created_at), and user_alerts (id, user_id, deal_id, sent_at). Ensure TypeScript types are fully generated and enforce strict type safety across all workspaces.
```

2. **Authentication & User Preferences** — Implement authentication using better-auth and build user settings screens for selecting home airports and deal destination preferences.

```
Implement email/password authentication using better-auth integrated into the Next.js backend and shared across the Expo mobile app via API clients. Build a settings screen on both web and mobile that allows authenticated users to select multiple home airports (e.g., JFK, SFO) and specify their cabin class preference (economy, premium_economy, business_class). Store these preferences in user-associated tables and create API endpoints to fetch and update them.
```

3. **Flight Data Ingestion Pipeline** — Build a background worker script that mocks or fetches incoming flight price data feeds and populates the flight_deals table.

```
Create a background worker script in the /worker service running on a cron schedule. Implement a modular provider interface that can ingest flight pricing data either from public aviation APIs or structured mock feeds. Parse incoming pricing records, normalize origin and destination airport codes, calculate discount percentages relative to historical averages, and insert valid records into the flight_deals table. Include robust error handling and rate-limit management for external HTTP requests.
```

4. **Deal Filtering & Anomaly Detection Engine** — Develop the core filtering algorithm that evaluates flight deals against user preferences and flags significant price drops or mistake fares.

```
Develop a filtering and matching engine service that runs after every flight data ingestion batch. The engine must query active flight deals, compare prices against historical thresholds for specific routes, and flag deals with discounts exceeding 40% or obvious pricing errors as mistake fares. Filter deals matching user home airports and subscription tiers (e.g., economy-only for Free/Premium users, business class for Elite users), generating pending notification queue items.
```

5. **Multi-Channel Notification Dispatcher** — Wire up Resend for email alerts and OneSignal or Expo push notifications to dispatch deal alerts to users.

```
Build a notification dispatcher service that processes the pending notification queue. Integrate Resend for sending beautifully styled HTML email alerts containing deal summaries, direct airline booking links, and pricing details. Integrate OneSignal or Expo push notification services to dispatch real-time alerts to the mobile app clients. Implement idempotency checks to ensure users never receive duplicate alerts for the same deal ID.
```

6. **Web Dashboard & Mobile Feed UI** — Build the user-facing interfaces on web and mobile to browse active deals, view deal details, and manage subscriptions.

```
Build the deal feed UI in both the Next.js web app and the Expo mobile app. The interface must display a chronological list of active flight deals filtered by the user's home airports, featuring destination imagery, price drop badges, airline names, and direct booking CTA links. Include search filters by region and cabin class, along with a subscription upgrade page outlining Free, Premium, and Elite tiers.
```

### Cost vs paying

**Starting costs (one-time):**

- AI Coding Tools (Claude Pro): $20
- Domain Name: $12
- Total: ~$32 one-time

**Ongoing costs (monthly):**

- Vercel Hobby/Pro Hosting: $0-20
- Fly.io Worker Hosting: $5
- Resend Email API: $0 (Free Tier)
- Total: ~$15-25/mo

- Paying for the SaaS instead: $4.15/mo (averaged across Premium annual plan)
- Build time: 40-60 hours
- AI tool credits: $20 one-time (Claude Pro)
- Break-even: Not a financial win (subscription is ~$49/yr, build is for learning and personal utility)

## Sources

- [Going Official Documentation - How Going Works](https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQGBYGGdroGktpyjLVLBFckgZdoJQmKK6ZL0uTg0eCptElhB26AJKjzTg1J3w_eEKZFRWi0El8HRb5A4JEQ4o5heKYEW7lN-dXCCw_TIrx7QIMFWZ58a1ghPu4h6vw1V4AqaEpg/)
- [Going Membership Tiers & Pricing Breakdown](https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQFRrOFhyNsgqJo7l7ttS0dw2QpIKxMcYVKqTnJEiI_dASLvnoepPnURVL6lHIJKI6fBJIRKY2Ec_3BobU6recbB8cei5xWQXlXHTxliHhChV2yEbtccfUt6)
- [Himalayas Tech Stack Database - React Native usage for Going](https://vertexaisearch.cloud.google.com/grounding-api-redirect/AUZIYQHVM4phVhcDmdavobDGvzLY_kZmA0WrfIhxZOkpTXIMEQ39NmdlEXVhlalbYJdVbgZFNX1MU-eQyWzzCjm4rE5u0451bAGBVFoFpCPNCoRwowcgiiU6mOBmVZPbiOfprfju-JzQcs80GCwBt6sMbol-6VYJ07bcFRRhYkWoRjFo7Ac5byfR5-o=)