I built this because I kept checking Google Flights every day for the same routes. FareBot is a Telegram bot you host yourself that does it for you and your friends.
Runs with Docker, no API key needed. It’s meant for you and a few friends: anyone else who messages it sends you an access request.
One I found with it: Budapest to Venice for €17, 83% below usual:
Limitations: Google Flights has no public API, so if Google changes the page it breaks until I update the parser. One-way flights only for now.
Feedback welcome!
Did you use AI at all while working on this?
I guarantee it’s vibe coded slop.
I rarely fly and don’t use Telegram (is that the one controlled by a Russian emigre?) but I love the idea of something like this for a platform I use (fedi, xmpp, nextcloud, even email) that let me easily define scrapers for things like high speed trains and hotels.
I haven’t looked at the code yet but I imagine one could abstract away the Telegram stuff and make it compatible with a wide range of notification “adapters.” I myself would probably just use RSS.
I would love to see this with some integration with simple http entrypoint. So we could manage notifications in a larger list of tools (with ntfy for example) without no complication for you 😉
Well, it’s seems like you don’t have any public front to manage the query in first place… So not a quick fix. 😆
