Daniel Harris ran a poll this morning: would operators switch to revenue-share software pricing? WingStack.ai charges a percentage of revenue instead of a flat fee, and the argument is the software only earns when you do.
We think both options in that poll are the wrong question.
The Flat-Fee Problem
Start with what operators actually pay. A safety management system can run $70K a year. We've seen crew records systems priced at $15K for a bare-bones deployment, no integrations, no eligibility logic, just a database with a login page. That's $85K annually for two systems that don't talk to each other, before you count the hours your team spends re-keying the same certification data into both. And when the renewal comes up, you have zero leverage, your five years of safety reports live in their schema.
The Revenue-Share Problem
Revenue-share sounds aligned. It isn't. It's a tax on your growth. The vendor earns on your volume, not their value. Fly more, pay more, even if the software did nothing different. In a business with charter margins, handing software a percentage of top-line is a rough trade. And you still don't own the code, the data, or the exit.
It's the same lock-in with a different invoice.
The Third Model
Open source the software. Make the money on services.
When the code is open, you're not paying for access, you're paying for expertise, implementation, and support. The things that actually require a human who understands Part 135 operations.
The economics work because the incentives finally point the same direction. The provider only gets paid when they're doing something useful. Not when procurement forgets to cancel, and not as a percentage of revenue they didn't generate.
And the integration problem disappears by design. When SMS and crew records share a codebase, a certification update flows straight to flight-readiness status. At one operator, that's 40 hours a month back, a chief pilot's time that was going to chasing paperwork instead of flying the operation. It also meant never standing up a technical records department. That's not a line item on a software quote, but it's the biggest number in this whole argument.
Full Disclosure
Open source isn't free. Someone still hosts it, configures it, and keeps it compliant as regulations move. That's the services business, and we're not pretending total cost drops to zero. What drops is the lock-in, and that changes every negotiation you have afterward.
The role everyone should be hiring
There's a job title for the person this model actually requires, and Palantir coined it twenty years ago: the forward deployed engineer. An engineer who embeds with the customer, builds against the customer's real problems on the customer's own data, and ships. Not someone who sells you a license and mails you a login.
For years that looked like a Palantir eccentricity. In 2026 it's the fastest-growing role in software. Forward deployed engineer hiring is up more than 1,000% year over year. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Cloud are all hiring them. AWS says it will embed thousands of them directly inside customer teams. Read what that means: the companies with the best software on earth have concluded that software alone doesn't land. The value is the engineer standing in your operation.
That's the quiet part of the SaaS story said out loud. If the vendors themselves are pivoting from licenses to embedded engineers, the seat price was never the value. Operators should draw the same conclusion from the other side: stop budgeting for subscriptions and start budgeting for a forward deployed engineer, someone who builds on open code, in your operation, on your data. That's the entire model we're describing here, and it's why the software is becoming the free part.
What We're Building
We're putting our money where the thesis is. Two products coming soon:
SMS, safety management built for how operators actually report, investigate, and close out events. Not a $70K compliance checkbox.
Crew Records, certifications, qualifications, sim training, and flight logs with eligibility computed, not tracked in someone's head. At $15K a year, the bare-bones incumbents give you a database with a login page and no integrations. Ours shares a codebase with everything else, which is the entire point.
Who this is for
If you're paying rent on your own data, we should talk. If you're happy with your current vendor lineup and the invoices that come with it, no hard feelings. This model isn't for everyone yet.
But it will be.
Benjamin Thomas
ForIT Team
