20 minutes ago, bennyboy75 said:

One nice thing about SI is it allows you to take a look at previous flights [...]

Your comment aside, this is really cool and a great way to visualize what it's thinking.

7 minutes ago, Lucky38i said:

Your comment aside, this is really cool and a great way to visualize what it's thinking.

It is. Also gives you the landing rate - 39fpm according to the log. Quite the butter!

It does some cool things, but it's just way too expensive unless you are literally simming all day. If simming is your life, then it would make sense, but if you have other things to do, take breaks for days/weeks.. it just doesn't' make sense. If it was like $5-8/month, you could forget about it for a few months, but at the prices they are charging.. nope. 

FSHud, BATC, and even the in-sim ATC (which is vastly improved) are good enough for me. 

I'm retired and average three hours a day flight simming.  SI is great and I wouldn't fly without it. 

17 minutes ago, vp49p3 said:

I'm retired and average three hours a day flight simming.  SI is great and I wouldn't fly without it. 

Yup there you go. It’s perfect if you use it a lot, and there’s plenty of products that are aimed squarely at your demographic. It’s not a bad product, but I do think they are a bit confused about their product-market fit.  

I do use SI ATC every day.  I like the AI traffic they are working on. I also like how they manipulated my voice to create a copilot, who somehow has my same sarcastic manner.  I'd be very happy if it was just ATC,  traffic and my sarcastic friend.

1 hour ago, JonathanC said:

Yup there you go. It’s perfect if you use it a lot, and there’s plenty of products that are aimed squarely at your demographic. It’s not a bad product, but I do think they are a bit confused about their product-market fit.  

I'd agree with that actually. For most people you really need to invest time to get the most out of it. 

I'm not retired at all – the complete opposite at the moment where I have a few hours per month for any sort of sim flying. I'm happy to support the product because I think it's doing something really cool and delivers a lot of immersion when things go right. To me that's the product, with ATC being part of it. That's the thing that I feel like a lot of people miss – this isn't really another ATC program. It's part of it, but the overall goal is immersion. When everything comes together, I don't think there's a single product out there that can do as much for the feeling of actually doing the job.

I've had a flight with a sudden medical emergency, which became a tense two hours of constant catch ups with the cabin crew trying to figure out if it's under control or not. Forget worrying about the magenta line, how about trying to work out if the right thing to do is to divert or keep going. I found that unexpectedly stressful, made me realise how much more to the job there is than just punching buttons.

Even just flying a widebody at night over the pacific, dealing with spotty Oceanic comms trying to make your report. It turned into a bit of a bug as in the end I learned there was a gap in coverage, but for a few hours I was busy problem-solving – looking up nearby centres and in the end managed to raise a passing airfield to pass my message until I was back in coverage. 

The emergent skyops stuff, flying a rescue heli trying to find hikers in the forest and coordinating with dispatch and crew in bad weather.

There was a bug with one of the early FSS 727 builds where one of your engines could cut out mid-flight. Ran into that one, and became a really memorable flight dealing with an emergency landing. Got successfully diverted and vectored to the nearest airfield, had to figure out a plan like where to hold to burn off fuel and the ATC supported all of it. 

My point is that when it works properly SI can do all of that. It's a total bummer about the price, I think it's a bad move and I always thought it should be getting more accessible and cheaper over time. For now I'm hoping they'll keep improving and making things better, and hopefully that will indeed happen.

 

Edited October 15, 2025Oct 15 by Georgleboui

1 hour ago, Georgleboui said:

when it works properly SI can do all of that. It's a total bummer about the price

Yes, I wish they would be a bit more clear about what they want to build, and then make that work properly instead of the constant bugginess (maybe it's not possible to do what they want with current tech, who knows). And then price it right. 

If it's truly not possible to build it at a lower price point, then it's doomed to be a very niche product. I can't see that there's a large market for a product that costs this much, month after month. How many people will be willing to pay this long term? Some, I'm sure, but it doesn't' feel like there's a large audience. 

I could be wrong of course, just thinking out loud. 

I really wish they would give the option of buying "ai voice time/characters" like BATC does.  I'd be interested in trying this on those occasions when I want to fly VFR/GA and speak (actually speak with a headset) to controllers, UNICOM etc.  However, since I mostly fly tubeliners, it wouldn't make sense for me to buy a subscription given I might fly VFR once a month.  The math just doesn't work.  I'm perfectly happy with BATC for tubeliner flying, but would like something that simulates VFR.

Their FAQ says they want to avoid a situation where "the meter is running", but frankly it should be an option.  I'm a big boy and can make decisions about what works for me.  I'm sure I'm not alone and they're missing out on potential business by not offering such an option, overall cost aside.

Edited October 15, 2025Oct 15 by regis9

I put a reminder in my calendar to review SI before my sub renews the 21st. The sub fee itself isn't onerable. It is roughly the cost of the sub dinner I get every Friday headed to game night.

But, they still need to work on separation. Last night leaving CYYZ I had an airplane cut me off crossing a taxiway and cleared me to take off while a plane was still on its takeoff roll. It was vectoring me along the published STAR I was on also. If I am going to ignore the ATC anyway, I may as well just stick to BATC.

Which makes me look at the $20 a month as maybe I could get a scenery a month instead, or after 3 months that would pay for the a340 I just got. 

On 10/11/2025 at 8:53 PM, GCBraun said:

I remember that when SI first launched, they were eager to say that prices would drop fairly quickly as AI technology evolved. But the exact opposite has happened.  

Why? In my view, it’s because of all the unnecessary bloat they keep adding to the product. A far better approach would’ve been to focus solely on vectoring and general IFR/VFR ATC, and then offer traffic injection as an optional add-on for those who wanted it…maybe as a small extra monthly fee.

They’re in a pretty unique position, offering a solution that works across both sims. If the base product were truly solid, which, after multiple tests, I don’t believe it is, I’d happily be a long-term subscriber.

Generally speaking, the way to drive down costs is at scale, but in this case, not necessarily, as the more users you add, the more compute you use.

Brian has to pay for the compute: the subscription is a best guess slightly above median customer token usage - you want your sub fee to cover above your fixed costs. On some customers you'll get totally hosed, on a higher percentage they'll use less tokens than the sub price. This is where the feature creep really hits - the more features and API calls you add, the more that % you take a loss on increases, and the profitability of the oversubscribed goes down. You could feasibly have this thing talking to you nonstop on a 2 hour flight between the tour guide, flight attendants, etc. (while it's also doing data calls not just voice synth)

2 years ago, pretty much any of us in tech would have said "compute will go down lol don't worry" - that just hasn't happened enough to offset... all the other stuff.

It's not an enviable position, since a lot of the compute infrastructure is locked behind $500bn+ in long-term investments. Pretty much all AI startups are experiencing this to a degree - the difference is many of them have oceans of private equity to float the boat. SayIntentions just has... us.

Edited October 16, 2025Oct 16 by mspencer

I was thinking today, I get lots of headons at taxiways at fairly mainstream airports (holding point at OMDB for example), planes just taxying towards me, even though I follow the SI guidance.  I still see loads of "generic" aircraft eveywhere, despite the fact that I have both IVAO and FSLTL libraries fully installed.  I'm guessing this is a drawback of the libraries or the sim itself, but I would love to see them gone.  It really kills the immersion.

Until these two things can be sorted, I don't think I'm ready for a price increase.  But then they are forcing us existing customers to stick with them to avoid said increase.  Not what we were told was going to be the case at all.

In balance, I still love the SI product, but it's in the dock.  

8 minutes ago, Langeveldt said:

despite the fact that I have both IVAO and FSLTL libraries fully installed

You should also install AIG, they have a lot of aircraft and airlines those other packs don't have.

 

For those who haven't delved deep into SI, airport movements are handled by profiles which you can view/modify/create on their taxi tuner app on the website, you can find a link on your profile page There's also a tutorial series on their youtube.

 

It has pros and cons, if your scenery doesn't match the profile, ATC could direct you/AI traffic to taxiways and parking that doesn't exist in your sim.

BATC for comparison just uses whatever scenery you have installed.

Edited October 16, 2025Oct 16 by Tuskin38

9 minutes ago, Langeveldt said:

But then they are forcing us existing customers to stick with them to avoid said increase.

This is exactly why I hate monthly subscription based stuff. Navigraph is my only subscription, and they have shown that they are a good company. In their case it makes sense for it to be a subscription, they need to constantly keep things up to date. And they don't do this kind of consumer hostile stuff. 

 

1 hour ago, JonathanC said:

This is exactly why I hate monthly subscription based stuff. Navigraph is my only subscription, and they have shown that they are a good company. In their case it makes sense for it to be a subscription, they need to constantly keep things up to date. And they don't do this kind of consumer hostile stuff. 

 

How is it “consumer hostile” to hold the lower cost for current subscribers?  What in your opinion should they have done?