Can AirHelp be vibe coded?
Pursue passenger compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked flights
A useful personal organizer is buildable, but AirHelp is more than the visible intake form. A local app can assess EC261 and UK261 eligibility, organize evidence, draft letters, and track deadlines. It cannot responsibly reproduce AirHelp's managed airline correspondence, cross-jurisdictional legal judgment, funded court action, and professional accountability. This is a credible personal substitute for straightforward self-service claims, not a full replacement.
Jump to the build brief ↓Checked Aug 2026
high editorial confidence
Buildability by layer
Screens, forms, and focused interactions
The repeatable job the product performs
Availability and legality of required data
Uptime, queues, support, and maintenance
Security, compliance, and user confidence
The achievable core
- Assess EC261 and UK261 eligibility, organize journey facts and evidence, estimate compensation, generate draft letters, and track submission and escalation deadlines locally.
- Build a focused single-user workflow with real persistence, search, and export.
- A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.
The parts a prompt cannot buy
- AirHelp staff handling airline correspondence and negotiation
- case-specific legal judgment across jurisdictions
- lawyer access and funded legal action under a no-win, no-fee model
- commercial flight, weather, and disruption data used to validate claims
- Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
- Trust, audits, and counterparties matter more than feature parity.
Why people still pay
People pay AirHelp to transfer the work, uncertainty, follow-up, and legal escalation to a specialist on a no-win, no-fee basis. A local tool can organize a straightforward self-service claim, but it does not negotiate with the airline, fund litigation, or take professional responsibility for a contested case.
Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
Trust, audits, and counterparties matter more than feature parity.
Connectors, OAuth flows, and vendor API changes require constant upkeep.
The brief
Context, requirements, acceptance criteria, non-goals, and the full production standard — as Markdown, ready for any coding agent.
Build brief — a focused alternative to AirHelp
Context
**AirHelp** — Pursue passenger compensation for delayed, canceled, or overbooked flights. It currently costs Variable pricing.
A useful personal organizer is buildable, but AirHelp is more than the visible intake form. A local app can assess EC261 and UK261 eligibility, organize evidence, draft letters, and track deadlines. It cannot responsibly reproduce AirHelp's managed airline correspondence, cross-jurisdictional legal judgment, funded court action, and professional accountability. This is a credible personal substitute for straightforward self-service claims, not a full replacement.
This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of AirHelp that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest.
What you are building
Assess EC261 and UK261 eligibility, organize journey facts and evidence, estimate compensation, generate draft letters, and track submission and escalation deadlines locally.
Build a focused single-user workflow with real persistence, search, and export.
A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.
Requirements
Functional
Node.js 22.
Modern browser.
SQLite.
User-entered flight, passenger, and evidence data.
Current official passenger-rights sources.
Non-functional
Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support.
Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle.
Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down.
Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it.
Implementation brief
Build me a local flight-compensation claim organizer to replace AirHelp for self-service claims. Requirements:
Node 22 + Express + better-sqlite3, server-rendered pages on localhost, no frontend
framework; all data in one SQLite file plus a local uploads folder.
Model passengers, bookings, multi-segment journeys, disruptions (delay, cancellation,
denied boarding, missed connection), claims, evidence files, and deadlines.
Deterministic EC261 and UK261 eligibility rules in one versioned rules module: given
the journey facts, output eligible / not eligible / needs manual review, the
compensation band (250/400/600 EUR distance tiers), and the article relied on.
Show which facts triggered which rule branch.
Compute great-circle distance from airport coordinates and timezone-safe arrival
delay from user-entered flight details; no commercial flight-data API.
Attach evidence (tickets, emails, receipts) as local files on a chronological
claim timeline.
Generate editable draft letters to the airline and the national enforcement body
from templates; never send anything automatically.
Track stages (preparing, submitted, escalated to authority or ADR, resolved) with
due dates, exported as an ICS file for my calendar.
Export a whole claim as JSON and Markdown so nothing is trapped in the app.
Say plainly in the UI and README: decision support, not legal advice; verify
current rules and limitation periods yourself.
Out of scope: automatic submission, airline negotiation, lawyer engagement, court
filing, accounts, sync. The staff, legal funding, and accountability are the part
you cannot build.
README: setup, where data lives, backup by copying the SQLite file and uploads.
Delivery standard
Inspect the repository first, then write a short implementation plan before writing code.
Deliver the smallest complete end-to-end workflow first; every primary control must work against persisted data.
Use real validation and storage; never substitute fake dashboards, decorative controls, hard-coded success states, or mock integrations.
Include responsive layouts plus genuine empty, loading, success, validation, and failure states.
Keep secrets server-side in environment variables, provide .env.example, and never commit credentials or user data.
Add structured logs around every external call and return actionable errors without leaking sensitive details.
Write unit tests for the core logic and one automated test of the main user journey.
Finish with a README covering setup, architecture, data location, backups, tests, deployment, and known limitations.
Acceptance criteria
A clean install starts the app using only the README and .env.example.
The primary journey works from first visit through saved result, reload, edit, export, and deletion where applicable.
Invalid input, missing configuration, provider failure, and an empty database each have a usable state.
The interface works at 390px and 1440px, is keyboard navigable, and shows visible focus on every control.
Tests, type checking, linting, and a production build all pass with no ignored failures.
No part of the interface implies a live integration, security guarantee, or scale capability that was not actually built and verified.
Non-goals
Do not build these, and do not claim to have replaced them:
AirHelp staff handling airline correspondence and negotiation.
Case-specific legal judgment across jurisdictions.
Lawyer access and funded legal action under a no-win, no-fee model.
Commercial flight, weather, and disruption data used to validate claims.
Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.
Trust, audits, and counterparties matter more than feature parity.
What you still own after launch
Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.
Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.
Risk
**High consequence.** Use this as a prototype or personal aid. Keep a qualified human and an established provider in the loop for consequential decisions.
Editorial confidence in this assessment: high. No independent one-shot implementation is linked yet.
Prior art
Working open-source software you can read, fork, or borrow from before starting:
[ClaimSolo](https://github.com/codecube/ClaimSolo) — Open-source, local-first personal workspace for assessing, documenting, and tracking EC261 and UK261 flight claims
Generated by [Can It Be Vibe Coded?](https://www.canitbevibecoded.com) · Full report: https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/airhelp
You still own the product
- Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates.
- Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change.
- Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss.
- Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.
Open-source prior art
Before you start
Can AirHelp be vibe coded?
Partly, if you narrow it. A useful personal organizer is buildable, but AirHelp is more than the visible intake form. A local app can assess EC261 and UK261 eligibility, organize evidence, draft letters, and track deadlines. It cannot responsibly reproduce AirHelp's managed airline correspondence, cross-jurisdictional legal judgment, funded court action, and professional accountability. This is a credible personal substitute for straightforward self-service claims, not a full replacement.
What can an AI coding agent reproduce from AirHelp?
Assess EC261 and UK261 eligibility, organize journey facts and evidence, estimate compensation, generate draft letters, and track submission and escalation deadlines locally. Build a focused single-user workflow with real persistence, search, and export. A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states.
What will a DIY AirHelp replacement still be missing?
AirHelp staff handling airline correspondence and negotiation; case-specific legal judgment across jurisdictions; lawyer access and funded legal action under a no-win, no-fee model; commercial flight, weather, and disruption data used to validate claims; Compliance, licensing, and legal accountability are core features.; Trust, audits, and counterparties matter more than feature parity.
What do I still own after building a AirHelp alternative?
Run migrations, backups, restores, and dependency updates. Test the critical journey after every model, API, or hosting change. Monitor failures and fix the edge cases a first prompt will miss. Maintain every third-party integration as APIs and OAuth rules change.