AeroToys
Manifesto

An open foundation for Modern Airline Retailing.

Airlines have spent four decades paying GDS rents, PSS licences, and integration fees to vendors who own the plumbing they depend on. Modern Airline Retailing is the chance to rewrite that contract — but only if the foundation underneath it is open. AeroToys is that foundation.

What we believe

  • Airline IT cost should trend toward zero. The marginal cost of running a schedule lookup, an offer assembly, or an order write is a fraction of a cent. Anything more is rent extracted from the passenger.
  • The foundation must be open source. Distribution, taxation, schedule reference data, and the rules engine that orchestrates them are industry plumbing — not competitive advantage. Closed plumbing is how we got here.
  • The differentiating layer should be private. Pricing strategy, merchandising, brand, ancillary mix — that is where airlines compete. Our rules engine lets you keep the secret sauce private while sharing the runtime.
  • Composable beats monolithic. Adopt one block. Adopt all of them. Fork what you don't like. Replace what doesn't fit. That is the deal.

Two stacks, one foundation

AeroToys ships in two halves that share the same forge layer:

  • The airline stack — Offer Management, Order Management, Open Shopping Engine, Open Stock Keeper, Open Schedules. Self-hosted, fork-friendly, source-available. This is what an airline runs to sell, service, and settle.
  • The community stack — Open Tax Engine, Open Schedules Data, and a growing set of fares, codeshare, and IATA reference apps. Hosted by airlines for airlines. Free APIs. Peer-verified data. The shared truth source the industry has been missing.

Both stacks sit on RuleForge (the Open Rules Engine) and DocumentForge (the Open Order Database Engine). Same forge, different governance.

How this drives cost down

Today an airline pays for: a PSS, a revenue accounting system, a fares engine, an availability cache, a shopping engine, an NDC gateway, a settlement adapter, a tax engine, schedule data feeds, codeshare reconciliation, and a stack of integration middleware. Most of these are solved problems sold as licensed differentiators.

The AeroToys bet: open the boring 70% of the stack, share the cost of running the community layer across the industry, and let airlines spend their IT budget on the 30% that actually differentiates them. The savings flow somewhere — either to the bottom line or, ideally, to the passenger.

What you can do today

  • Read the code. The Order Database Engine and Rules Engine are Apache 2.0 on GitHub.
  • Run the forges locally. No vendor call required.
  • Tell us what to build next. The Tax Engine and Open Schedules Data are on approach. We need design partners.
  • Contribute. If you've been carrying tribal knowledge about airline taxation, schedule data, or NDC mappings — there is a home for it here.