How CanIFlyWithMyBattery stays free

CanIFlyWithMyBattery is a small, independent side project. It has no ads, no logins and no subscription, and it doesn’t sell or share data. It stays free because everything it runs on has a free tier, and the site is small enough to fit inside them. Below is each service and what its free tier allows.

The server
Oracle Cloud Free Tier (opens in a new tab)

The site and Coolify run together on one Oracle Cloud virtual machine, with the database as a file on its disk. The Always Free resources in Oracle Cloud Free Tier don’t expire and include:

• 2 Arm (Ampere A1) CPU cores and 12 GB of memory in total
• 200 GB of disk
• 10 TB of outbound data a month

That’s plenty. CanIFlyWithMyBattery is one small app: a search is a quick look-up in a short list of batteries, and the calculator runs in your browser, so the server does very little for each visitor.

Deploys
Coolify (opens in a new tab)

Coolify is an open-source, self-hostable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for deploying and managing websites, apps and databases on your own servers. Each update is pulled from GitHub, built into a container and started in place of the old one. Coolify also keeps the app running, restarts it if it crashes, routes web traffic to it, and keeps the database on storage that survives every update.

Self-hosted Coolify is free. Only its hosted cloud version is paid.

Database
SQLite (opens in a new tab)

The battery list is a single file on the server’s disk. SQLite is public-domain software, so there’s no database service to pay for, and a backup is just a copy of that file.

In front of the site
Cloudflare (opens in a new tab)

Cloudflare’s free plan has no bandwidth limit and covers DNS, HTTPS certificates, caching and DDoS protection. Its free Web Analytics counts visits without cookies (see Privacy).

Uptime alerts
UptimeRobot (opens in a new tab)

UptimeRobot’s free plan checks up to 50 addresses every 5 minutes, and sends an alert if the site goes down.

Code
GitHub (opens in a new tab)

The code lives in a private repository on GitHub’s free plan, which includes private repositories and 2,000 minutes a month of automated testing.

Data
Where the battery details come from

From makers’ published specifications, tested and cross-referenced with community hardware databases including r/ChargingSheet (opens in a new tab). There’s no paid data feed. The limits come from the FAA and IATA (see Sources).

Cost
What it does cost

The caniflywithmybattery.com domain name ($10.46 a year) and the AI tokens used to build it, both paid out of pocket. And the time spent building it and checking the battery details, with years of experience designing and building digital products behind it.

Ads
No ads, maybe affiliate links

There are no ads. Ads load other companies’ scripts that follow you from site to site, slow the page down and push the answer aside, on a page you may be checking in an airport line.

Later, battery pages may link to places to buy batteries through affiliate programs such as Amazon Associates, which pay a small share of a sale. If that happens, those links will be clearly marked, this page and Privacy will be updated first, and a link will never change what a page says about a battery or whether it can fly.

Help
How you can help

If a friend, coworker or family member is flying with a power bank, send them caniflywithmybattery.com. Word of mouth is the only marketing it has.

And share feedback or corrections at [email protected].

Future
If that changes

If CanIFlyWithMyBattery ever outgrows the free tiers, the plan is to pay for a bigger server out of pocket, not to add ads, a subscription or a paywall. If there is any change to that plan, it will be posted on this page first.

But, that’s not gonna happen.