Calling Flight-Sim Addon Creators — Help Build Hangar Addons

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Hey everyone!

I’m Michael, and I’m building Hangar Addons, a new free community platform for flight-sim addons covering MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024, and X-Plane.

You can read more about what I’m building and the philosophy behind the site here:

I’m reaching out to addon creators because I’d love to start building Hangar Addons with the community, rather than simply building another site and hoping creators eventually show up.

I’d like to host your addons​

I’m looking for developers and creators who would be willing to give Hangar Addons permission to host and distribute their addons.

The goal is to create another reliable place where simmers can discover and download your work while giving creators more exposure and another distribution channel.

You would continue to own your work. Nothing changes about your ownership or rights.

For creators who participate, we would:

  • Give you full credit and attribution.
  • Link to your website, Discord, profile, or other preferred destination.
  • Preserve your addon descriptions and documentation.
  • Respect your existing licensing and distribution requirements.
  • Only host content you specifically authorize us to host.
  • Remove your content if you ever ask us to.
  • Never claim ownership of your work.

If you’d rather continue hosting the files yourself, we’re also happy to link directly to your existing download location instead.

Why am I building this?​

I want Hangar Addons to be a genuinely useful resource for the flight-sim community and, most importantly, a platform that respects the people who actually create the content that makes our simulators great.

I’m not interested in putting downloads behind paywalls or creating artificial barriers for users. The goal is to keep the resource free and make it as easy as possible for people to discover and enjoy great addons.

The full reasoning behind the project is on the About page:

Interested?​

If you’re an addon creator and you’d be interested in contributing feel free to upload your creations or, reply to this thread or send me a DM.

Even if you aren’t ready to provide your files, I’d really appreciate your feedback. I’m interested in hearing what creators would want from a platform like this and what concerns you’d have about allowing another site to distribute your work.

I’d love to build this with the developers and creators, not just for them.
Thanks for everything you contribute to the flight-sim community! ✈️
Hangar Addons
https://hangaraddons.com

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Thanks for the initiative.

I have something like 30 freeware’s with half a million of download, hosted by flightsim.to. I have zero issue with them. It works flawlessly and so far match my need as amateur scenery developper. They set me « pro » but I’m 100% amateur. Even some drama launched every year or so doesn’t reach me. What you seems to offer (I didn’t browse all your website) is a straight competition to fligtsim.to, right ? I’m curious to know who’s the super generous donator that will pay the bill host hundred thousand of files and the huge bandwidth required. You as a single personal? Ok, fine. Wait&See. If the story starts free then few month later, I’m not ready to receive a « sorry guys, due to the success blabla, we need to …

The value proposition so far isn’t enough appealing. Ok, end-users have to pay by watching ads to download my stuff. Fair enough, I don’t have notice any feedback from my users. So far so good. And yes, I saw a post of a simmer complaining about rogue ads that didn’t raise much attention and mostly didn’t make me change my mind. Flightsim.to replied to the problem and fix it. Flightsim.to will steal my amateur’ish stuff? No big deal. There’sn’t much to steal and as I update regularly my small production, it’s just a matter of time to make it obsolete.

Ok, let’s change my mind. What would be the top 3 arguments to make the (expensive in time and burden) move, arguments that wasn’t in your original post?

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My 2 cents. I totally think @Vincent1064 has the main point covered there. Bandwidth cost. But as you wrote this below it made me think…

…perhaps a better angle for your site would be to make a much nicer and easier to use front-end (comparing to fs.to that somehow they make WORSE with each redesign) that just (and ONLY) links to other actual sources of the file, wherever they are. Like a combined library of all freeware ever. That would be a useful tool. One easy to use, ad-free port of call for simmers to find what they want. Of course they would need accounts at the host sites to actually get the downloads.

But maybe a stretch goal for you could be that you somehow integrate logins too? And update notifications. There is probably a lot you could do.

Your site could be the one-and-only bookmark simmers ever need. Just an idea!

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I completely understand both of your concerns. I’ve actually done this before with another flight simulation site called FSX Addons. I also previously owned and operated a much larger community site called NFSCars for Need for Speed. At its peak, NFSCars was one of the largest and oldest communities of its kind, with well over 50,000 addon cars. We where generating over 20 million page views a month.

In reality, bandwidth itself doesn’t cost nearly as much as people often assume. If someone is telling you that bandwidth alone is going to be an enormous expense, I’m sorry, but they’re not giving you an accurate picture.

I’m currently covering the infrastructure costs myself. The site is hosted in my own micro data center, which has an enterprise fiber-optic connection backed by an SLA. I’ve also had the servers and networking infrastructure in place and operational for well over a year.

My goal isn’t to make money by putting restrictions on users or charging them for faster downloads. I want to build a platform that remains free and accessible to the community while being sustainable through reasonable sources of revenue.

Check out the micro data center:

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I’m also not trying to put anyone out of business or take anything away from the other sites in the community. That’s really not my goal. I simply know that, personally, I’m not a fan of forced advertisements, artificial download limits, or other restrictions being used as a way to generate revenue far beyond what is actually necessary to operate the service.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that way. Flight simulation is already an expensive hobby, and I don’t think it needs to become even more expensive or restrictive simply to maximize revenue. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a site making money and covering its costs, but I believe there’s a reasonable balance between sustainability and putting unnecessary barriers in front of the community.

I also want to clarify that my comments about infrastructure and bandwidth are based on actual experience, not assumptions. I have close to 20 years of experience working with data centers, colocating equipment, and renting dedicated servers. I’ve dealt directly with the costs of servers, networking, bandwidth, power, connectivity, and data-center infrastructure for a very long time.

I currently operate my own micro data center with an enterprise fiber-optic connection backed by an SLA, and I’ve had the servers and infrastructure in place for well over a year. I therefore have a pretty good understanding of what the actual costs of operating this type of service look like.

My intention is simply to build another option for the flight sim community—one that remains free to users, doesn’t artificially restrict downloads, and is financially sustainable without trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of the people using it.

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One other thing I wanted to mention: right now, I have zero advertisements on the site, and that is completely intentional.

I’m not saying that will always be the case. At some point, I may need to introduce some reasonable advertising to help offset the costs of operating everything. However, I can promise that it will never be aggressive and it will never interfere with actually using the site.

You will never be forced to watch an advertisement or interact with one in order to download an addon or use another feature of the site. I also have no intention of introducing artificial waiting periods, download limits, or other barriers simply to generate additional revenue.

If I eventually have advertising, my goal is for it to be something users can essentially ignore rather than something that gets in their way. The site should be about the flight sim community and the addons—not about finding ways to extract as much revenue from users as possible.

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This is interesting! I’ll look into uploading a couple of my add-ons there.

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But again, the question remains: what do you call reasonable? If you ask people to fill your site with content, that seems like a reasonable question.

Mathijs

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Reasonable to me would be at most a few inline advertisements on pages. Not being forced to view ads to download files, no artificial download wait timers, nothing that blocks site functionality in anyway.

I ran a popular Need for Speed community site called NFSCars for over 24 years without having to implement any aggressive advertising to sustain infrastructure and the catalog for downloads was close to 20k and traffic was substantial.

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Thanks for the reply.

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Downloads for MSFS are currently held by a monopoly. And any monopoly mainly benefits the holder of the monopoly. So I always support competition.

On the ad front I don’t mind seeing ads that support the hosting of a free upload site, so have no problem with you adding ads in future. However I would comment that ads that hinder me or slow me down when I am adding or editing content on your website, I would not support. The monopoly holder currently does this, even though without our content, they would have no website. Yet they make us sit through ads just to add content to make them a living. What sort of madness is this.

I have uploaded my first livery to Hanger Addons and found the process simple and easy to use. It would be nice if you could automate the approval process for uploads. Crispy136.

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That’s exactly what I am not going to do. It’s one thing to support the site and community with ads, it’s another to try and make as much money as possible at the expense of degrading the user experience.

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I have noticed that all the files that are uploaded to the site always gets the latest date under the “Last Updated” section. So now all files says 18 september and at midnight even if they don’t have an update it will say 19 september.

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it’s being updated when an addon is viewed, downloaded, commented, rated, etc.

Will update so it only updates if the author makes changes.

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This is really cool. Planning to update my airports to the newest FS2024 SDK and once I do, I’ll add them there.

I noticed there’s a very cool mod for Asobo’s XCub there that adds an analog panel, and I believe is unique to your site. My first download!

I’m happy to frequent the site and support you, but I have a couple of terabytes of add-ons at this point, most from fs.to. And that’s a lot to manage when looking for new stuff.

So something that would be hugely helpful would be a way to filter “Hangar Addons exclusive” content. Not in an exclusionary way meant to get people to post only on your site, but rather a way for those of us who also frequent other sources to find the great stuff that’s only on your site.

If I could bookmark a Hangar Addons link that would show me new content on the site that I knew I hadn’t already downloaded elsewhere, I’d enthusiastically add that to my “new stuff” check routine!

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That’s something I will consider adding. Right now the closest thing we have is new addons since your last visit, Browse MSFS Addons, X-Plane Addons | Hangar Addons

I can add a checkbox to the upload form and edit addon form to mark if the addon is only hosted at Hangar Addons. Feel free to join and make a post in the Suggestions forum.

17

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a quick update on Hangar Addons, since it’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks since I opened the site.

I originally started Hangar Addons with a fairly simple idea: build a modern, free place for the flight sim community to find addons, share their own work, plan flights, and eventually have a real community around it.

A lot has happened since launch.

What’s available now

The addon manager has also evolved quite a bit already. The latest versions added dependency aware installs, release notes before updates, rollback support, and the ability to run telemetry on a separate PC from the simulator.

The site currently has 200+ addons, and we’ve already transferred hundreds of gigabytes of addon data and seen thousands of downloads. We also passed 650 registered members surprisingly quickly after launch.

And honestly, that’s been the most encouraging part for me. It’s gone from something I was building mostly by myself into something people are actually using and contributing to.

What’s next?

There’s still a lot I want to build.

I’m working on improving the creator experience, expanding the flight planning and tracking features, adding more community functionality, and continuing to make the addon manager better.

I’m also very interested in making Hangar Addons a place where addon developers can have more of a direct presence rather than simply having their files listed on another download site.

The entire thing is still very much a work in progress.

Most importantly, Hangar Addons is intended to remain free. There are no paid download tiers, download timers, speed restrictions, or forced ads. I want the site to be useful first and worry about sustainable infrastructure second.

I’m not trying to replace anything that’s already out there. There are a lot of great MSFS community sites, developers and creators, and I think there’s room for another site that brings some different ideas to the table.

If you’ve got a few minutes, take a look around:

And if you’ve already joined, downloaded something, uploaded an addon, or given me feedback, thank you. I’ve been genuinely surprised by how quickly this has grown.

There’s a long way to go, but I’m having a lot of fun building it.

— Michael
Hangar Addons

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Cool, bookmarked, will be sure to visit frequently!

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Another update I wanted to mention. We launched a new feature for the site called Livery Studio.

Livery Studio lets you paint a custom livery for a supported MSFS 2024 aircraft right in your browser, preview it in 3D, then export it for MSFS 2024 or publish it to Hangar Addons.

It’s still very early and is in active development. Expect bugs, we’re fixing them as we find them, and your feedback helps.

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Just wanted to share a quick update and thank everyone who has visited Hangar Addons, uploaded content, reported bugs, shared feedback, or offered suggestions. All of your support has been incredibly helpful in improving and refining the site.

We’ve made some great progress in a short amount of time, and the growth so far has been amazing to see. There’s still plenty more to come, and I’m excited to keep building on what we’ve started.

Thanks again to everyone who’s been part of it so far! :slight_smile: