31–40 of 76 posts
I made an open source version of this. https://github.com/scott113341/southwest-price-drop-bot
Honestly, I think it's pretty lame trying to profit from arbitrage on SW prices like that. $3 per alert? Really?
Great job making an OSS implementation.
So, the Southwest TOS state that you can't scrape or programmatically access their data. Isn't that the end of the argument unless they find a way to manually access it for customers?
Given they're charging for this service, maybe there's a way to make it work economically by having low cost workers (e.g. Mechanical Turk or even a bank of workers in certain countries) perform the checks manually (you could even create a browser extension that automates the form filling, but leaves a human to push the button and parse the results). At least by offering it as a paid service, they have some sums they…
User comes to your site, clicks a button, and Southwest's page loads in an iframe, where js does the lifting.
Maybe you can crowdsource pricing info. That way, you're not scraping, and users are voluntarily sharing what they've searched.
Plus, with the way airline pricing works now, just because Alice sees one price doesn't mean Bob will see it ten minutes later. The faster the prices change, the higher the percentage of people you need to have crowdsourcing.
And I've just assumed that "crowdsourcing" looks like "install a browser extension". If it involves "typing numbers into another site" you can expect a participation rate indistinguishable from 0%. I've also assumed Southwest remains oblivious to this and never takes any actions to counter what they consider an undesirable use, which is also unrealistic.
Make it an app not a website. Users can download and install it, enter flight data and click to start monitoring.
Please use the original title ("Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup").
Given they're charging for this service, maybe there's a way to make it work economically by having low cost workers (e.g. Mechanical Turk or even a bank of workers in certain countries) perform the checks manually (you could even create a browser extension that automates the form filling, but leaves a human to push the button and parse the results). At least by offering it as a paid service, they have some sums they…
Set it up so the user's browser scrapes it when a button is pressed, and send a reminder every X days as chosen by the user.... User comes to your site, clicks a button, and Southwest's page loads in an iframe, where js does the lifting.