Questions From Pilots

We're built owner-first, with our product focus on single-aircraft owners and multi-owner partnerships. Most aircraft apps optimize for other business models or stop at a disconnected logbook; we started with sole owners and shared ownership together, and every feature is fundamentally the tool we wish we had for our own aircraft.

That shows up most clearly in the financial ownership side of flying: true cost of ownership per hour and per year, balance netting between partners, and clean settlement so co-owners aren't chasing each other for receipts. It's the stuff a spreadsheet can technically do, but no one actually keeps up with.

Nope! HobbsMate Basic is free — no credit card required.

You get unlimited manual flight logging, maintenance tracking, and structured basics for your aircraft — including 1 owner + 1 read-only viewer per aircraft on Basic. You also get free usages of photo logging, chat, receipt capture, and other HobbsMate Intelligence® features so you can try them before deciding if HobbsMate is for you.

It's a complete aircraft management system, not a trial.

You don't have to switch everything. Many pilots use HobbsMate alongside their current setup:

• ✓Flight planner + HobbsMate: Keep your EFB for flight planning, use HobbsMate for maintenance/logs
• ✓Spreadsheet → HobbsMate: Start with the free plan, see if photo logging saves you time
• ✓Another tracking app + HobbsMate: Try photo capture on Basic; upgrade to Multi-owner when you need partnership workflows

The free plan is risk-free. Try it for a month and decide.

Because we're pilots building for pilots, not investors.

We're profitable from subscriber fees alone (no VC funding), which means:

• →No pressure to jack up prices or add paywalls to hit investor metrics
• →No risk of shutdown if we can't raise another funding round
• →We only add features that make flying easier (not what looks good in pitch decks)

Plus, we built this for our own aircraft. We're not going anywhere. Meet the team →

Whether to upgrade is really up to you as pilot or owner — we won't pretend one stack fits every operation or budget.

Behind the scenes we've spent hours debating where to draw lines so Basic stays genuinely useful — without petty paywalls on fundamentals — while AI-heavy paths stay sustainable for us (those bills are real) and revenue can still reinvest in the whole product. We're aiming for a honest spot between stripped-down budget apps and ultra-premium suites, not bait-and-switch tiers.

If Basic already fits your flying, that's fine too: manual logging, upkeep tracking, 1 owner + 1 viewer per aircraft, and trial-sized Intelligence usages stay available. No pressure — use what fits.

Add all your photos and receipts after the flight and submit. We take that data and build a draft flight log entry for you.

Once you approve (or edit and approve), we delete your Hobbs/Tach photos and create the fuel expenses for your records. That simple.

Yes. Web, iOS, and Android from day one.

We're cross-platform from launch (not years later as an afterthought like some apps). Use HobbsMate on your phone in the cockpit, then review on your computer at home.

Native apps for iOS and Android, plus a fully responsive web app.

We know you don't want to re-type years of flights. We're building self-serve import so you can bring your history over when it's ready, without a big migration project.

Until then, if you're on a paid plan, email us at support@hobbsmate.com. Tell us what you're coming from (spreadsheet, another app, a pile of exports—we've seen it). We'll work with you on a case-by-case basis to get you moved in.

On Basic, start fresh with manual and photo logging; import assistance is for subscribers while we finish self-serve.

It can be 5 minutes if you have all the information handy.

If you don't, you can still get going with just an aircraft registration number and backfill as you can. The more information you have, the better the system is.

You can log your first flight right away.

Just edit it before saving. The AI creates a draft. You always review before it's final.

In our testing, the AI is 95%+ accurate on clear photos. But if the Hobbs meter is dirty, angled, or blurry, it might misread. That's why you always get to review and edit.

Think of it as "auto-fill" not "auto-save."

Absolutely. Manual logging is always available on all plans (including free).

Some pilots use photo logging for routine flights and manual entry for unusual situations (ferry flights, maintenance runs, etc.). It's your choice every time.

You can keep using HobbsMate for free on Basic. Manual logging, maintenance tracking, and more stay available.

Free usages of photo logging, chat, and receipts let you try the AI features. If you want more and HobbsMate is for you, single-owner Plus brings the full solo-aircraft experience; Multi-owner fits shared aircraft and partnerships — see pricing when you're ready to compare tiers. No pressure, no expiration.

HobbsMate Intelligence® is the AI-powered system we've created (and are still building). It's our unique, holistic approach to interacting with your aircraft and the vast amount of data we all produce about our aircraft.

It encompasses:

• Chat grounded in your aircraft data: ask in plain language; answers are built from live lookups over your HobbsMate records (flights, expenses, maintenance, and more), with prompts that forbid inventing figures the tools didn't return.
• Auto flight logging: photos and receipts become draft log entries.
• AD analysis: matching and review with AI.
• Insights from your aircraft data and the entire database. For example: "Your GPH usage seems higher than most other 1969 Piper Cherokee 140s with the same engine setup."

It does a lot more than just chat. We keep dreaming up new ideas for HobbsMate Intelligence® almost daily — it seems — and your subscription helps keep that pipeline fed.

Yes. We separate users (full access — log flights, maintenance, expenses) from viewers (read-only). Per-aircraft limits:

• →Single-owner Basic (free): 1 user + 1 viewer
• →Single-owner Plus: Same seat limits as Single-owner Basic — 1 owner + 1 viewer per aircraft. The upgrade is analytics, expenses depth, HobbsMate Intelligence®, and AD tooling — not extra seats — on one solo-owned airplane.
• →Multi-owner: Multiple owners and expanded collaboration on one aircraft — partnership tools (cost splitting, settlements, attribution). See pricing for current rates.

You pay per aircraft for the plan that fits your operation. Single-owner Basic and Single-owner Plus both include one full-access owner seat and one read-only viewer seat per aircraft.

Yes. We're pilots too — we put our own logbooks and maintenance records in HobbsMate. We treat your aircraft data like something worth protecting, not an afterthought.

• When you use HobbsMate, what you send between your phone or browser and our systems isn't hanging out on the internet in readable plain text — it's protected the same way you'd expect from any serious online service you already trust with sensitive stuff (think banking or paying bills online).
• Where your data lives: on professional cloud systems we keep monitored, updated, and locked down — not a forgotten computer under someone's desk.
• Backups: regular encrypted copies with multiple restore points so a bad day doesn't mean a total loss.

Cancelling: We're working on export features. For now, cancelling simply puts you on the Basic plan at the end of your subscription. You only lose access to paid features, not your data.

Account deletion: Removes all references to your personal information (expenses, documents, account information). We retain the data for the aircraft so that other members or the aircraft record aren't left in a broken state.

We make money from subscriptions, not from selling your personal information. Your identifiable flight logs, expenses, and maintenance records aren't ours to monetize behind your back.

Down the road we may use aggregated, anonymized patterns from across HobbsMate — think community benchmarks (oil usage by make/model, typical cost bands, that sort of thing) that could eventually feed smarter insights, insurance or financing comparisons, or partner offers we pass along to owners. Nothing in that vein is live today. If we ship it, it stays statistical — not something that identifies you personally. No ads. No data-broker lists.

We're not positioning HobbsMate to flip it. Subscriber revenue is how we keep supporting our own flying habits while getting to do work we love for aviation. If everything went south and the business stopped being viable long term, our leaning would be to open-source what we responsibly can so owners aren't stranded — but that's a contingency worry, not something on the roadmap today.

From Lance: Personally: I don't want to build someone else's dream. I want to build mine — a family business where I can eat, sleep, and dream aviation and build cool software — not sell HobbsMate.

We're profitable from subscriber fees alone (no VC funding), so there's no investor clock forcing a sale or shutdown. If something genuinely unexpected happened, we'd want you to be able to export your data and we'd help you transition. We built this for our own aircraft; we're in it for the long haul.

Meet the team →