Free Pilot Logbook, No Subscription
Not free-for-30-days. Not free until you hit 50 flights. Not free with the export button greyed out. Free.
What “free” means here.
“Free” has been stretched thin by software that is free in the way a first taste is free. So it is worth being specific about what it means for NinerLog:
- There is one tier, and you are on it. No pro plan, no unlock, no feature held back as an upsell.
- No flight limit. Log twelve hours a year or twelve hundred; it makes no difference.
- No ads, and nothing sold on. Your logbook is not an advertising surface and your data is not a product.
- Export is not a paid feature. CSV, PDF and JSON, whenever you want, in full.
- No credit card to sign up, so there is nothing to cancel later.
The uncomfortable question that follows is the obvious one, so here is the answer.
So how is it paid for?
NinerLog is built by one person — a software engineer who has been flying GA since 2018 — and it is deliberately cheap to run. Hosting, database, domain and certificates come to roughly $30 a month. Development is volunteer time.
That bill is covered by donations from pilots who use it. There is no venture capital behind this, which means there is no investor who will eventually need the free tier to start converting. That pressure is the usual reason a free logbook stops being free, and it simply does not exist here.
Donating is genuinely optional. Nothing is withheld from people who do not, and there is no badge, no tier, no nag screen. If NinerLog saves you from a paper logbook, that is already the point of it.
Why this promise is worth more than a promise.
Every logbook says it cares about your data. Open source is what makes it checkable.
The licence protects you
The API is AGPL-3.0, everything else MIT. Today’s code cannot be retroactively taken away — if NinerLog ever changed direction, the version you trusted stays forkable by anyone.
You can leave at any time
The exit is built in and tested, not a formality. Take a full CSV, PDF or JSON export and go — lock-in is the problem NinerLog was written to solve in the first place.
Or take the whole thing
If the hosted service ever stopped, you could run it on your own server with Docker Compose. Your logbook outlives the project.
The honest trade-off.
Free and solo-built has a cost, and it is fair to say it out loud: NinerLog is younger than the commercial logbooks, there is no support desk, and features arrive when one person has evenings free. Some paid apps are more polished and more automated, and for some pilots that is worth paying for. What you get in exchange here is a logbook that cannot be taken hostage — and the ability to check every word of this against the source.
No trial. Just the logbook.
Sign up with an email address and start logging. That is the whole funnel.
Start Logging — It’s Free