PDXplore
Flight deals for Portland travelers, found by agents, approved over coffee.
- cut from one API swap
- $900/yr
- newsletter, never missed
- weekly
- approval gates on every ad
- 2
The problem
Flight deals are a speed game. A sale out of PDX can die in hours. I have a family and other businesses. Watching fares all day was never going to happen.
PDXplore finds flight deals from Portland and turns them into a weekly newsletter. I pick the deals, write the personal note, and approve what goes out.
What the agents do
The agents handle collection, verification, draft assembly, Instagram renders, and ad reviews. The deal engine collects Portland fares every day, flags deals against 90-day price baselines, and live-checks them against Google Flights before a reader sees one.
Wednesday's prompt asks me for the personal note. Thursday's run checks the fares and builds a review page with the flights and travel offers. Each section has a copy button that preserves its formatting when I paste it into Beehiiv.
What I do
I review roughly 15 deals across cash fares and points options. Friday's free edition gets three different destinations: one domestic, one beach, and one international. It waits for the paid edition to send before building its deal pages. I stage and send the emails myself.
I approve every caption, post, and ad. Instagram publishes after my approval. For ads, I enter the approved work in Meta and publish it myself.
Instagram has its own review
A selected deal becomes a three-slide carousel: price, travel dates, then a place to visit. Cash deals include a booking screenshot. Points deals get a points overlay.
I can change the caption, choose another photo, upload one from my phone, or ask for a different local spot from the review page. Approval publishes the carousel and enables the comment-to-DM reply with the booking details. A missing travel window or a price contradiction blocks approval.
The ad review ends with a decision
The weekly review checks each active ad for fatigue, delivery, and its earlier recommendations. It compares Meta's lead reporting with newsletter signups and gives me a verdict for each ad.
A replacement starts with the artwork in square, vertical, and wide formats. I approve the renders before the full copy is written. The review page then gives me the text and headlines with separate copy buttons. The current Meta connection is read-only. I enter and publish the ads myself.
What happened
The newsletter has shipped every week since October 2025 without a miss. One API swap cut $900 a year from infrastructure.
What it taught me
Check the link the reader will click.
In September, a booking link pointed at dates where the advertised fare did not hold. The check now has to cover the exact dates in the subscriber's link, not just a matching price elsewhere.
A successful task does not prove the ad changed.
The review checks the ad's actual state after a requested change. A completed checklist or a missing row in an active-only report cannot prove it was paused.
Watch for an empty result.
On October 1, a fare-brand filter matched the word "flight" and rejected every domestic fare. Whole-word matching fixed it.
