Seats.aero
👤 Ian Carroll (Pro bug-bounty hacker and security researcher; scraping data airlines actively defend is exactly his home turf.)🌐 siteian.sh𝕏LinkedIn
His weekend tool to book award flights grew to 500K users a month, big enough that Air Canada sued to shut it down.
Will it work? · our read
One guy, $1.5M. A live dataset only he keeps fresh at scale is the moat, but it is scraped from hostile airlines who sue and block, so survival depends on staying ahead in court and in code.
01How the money moves
Bots scrape live award-seat availability from 20+ airline programs
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Aggregate into one fast, searchable database with alerts
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Travelers pay $9.99/mo Pro to search a full year of availability
02The numbers
$1.5M ARR
end 2023 (founder)
LinkedIn
$8M ARR
2025, reported
ARR Club
500K
monthly users
founder
The $8M ARR is reported by trackers, not first-party; $1.5M is Ian's own 2023 figure. ARR Club
About $1.5M ARR (founder, end 2023); reported near $8M ARR by 2025.
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
Ian Carroll, LinkedIn: "just hit $1.5M in ARR" (end 2023, founder-stated)seats.aero — Air Canada lawsuit page (first-party)AwardWallet — Air Canada Aeroplan sues Seats.aero for millionsARR Club — Seats.aero ARR hits $8M (reported, 2025)The Daily Churn Ep 91 — Ian Carroll interview (500K MAU)
Headline revenue is Ian Carroll's own end-2023 LinkedIn figure — $1.5M ARR, entirely bootstrapped, solo, no full-time staff (first-party, verified). Later numbers ($8M ARR, $400K MRR, 300% y/y) are widely reported by secondary trackers (ARR Club, NoCodeBits, BoringCashCow) but not confirmed first-party, so they are tagged reported/EST. '100K+ paid members' looks cumulative, not active (it doesn't reconcile with $8M ARR at $9.99/mo), so it isn't headlined. The Air Canada cease-and-desist, Delaware suit, and Seats.aero's antitrust counterclaim are documented. CENTS grades, rival weights and prices are [our read]. We never score you.