I’m Jakke — Jakob Bourhil. I have been getting on planes since before I had any reason to think about what the miles were worth, and I built Gast because, decades later, I still didn’t have a good way to see all of them in one place.

Here is the honest version of how that happened. The shorter, tidier version lives on the About page. This is the messier one.

Flying before I was counting

I grew up just outside Stockholm — Swedish mother, Moroccan father. Every summer was two weeks in Málaga and then the better part of two months in Morocco with family, plus whatever European trips fell in between. I was a frequent flyer as a child without any of the vocabulary for it. Miles were just something that happened in the background of a boarding pass.

The obsession started properly later. At nineteen I moved to Norway for a sales job, which meant flying for work. A couple of years after that I started a web agency in Östersund, and between company travel, client trips, and the flights we booked as rewards for hitting targets, I spent about five years accumulating points across a growing pile of programmes — and mostly not knowing what any of it was worth. I had balances in places I’d half-forgotten. I had the vague, guilty sense that some of it was quietly expiring. What I did not have was a number.

Ten minutes with AwardWallet

About fourteen months ago, my partner and I set off to travel the world together. First flight: MAD to BKK. Somewhere around two months in, with actual time on my hands for once, I decided to finally get my points organised.

I tried AwardWallet. It lasted about ten minutes before I deleted it.

What stopped me wasn’t the interface. It was the model. To sync automatically, a tool like that logs into your airline and hotel accounts on your behalf — which means handing over the passwords to accounts that, between them, are worth real money. Even before I read a single forum thread, that felt wrong.

Later I read the threads anyway, and they were worse than my instinct. Collectors described British Airways accounts locked for months, a Qatar account blocked, two-factor codes arriving in the night because a tracker was trying to log in. Modern airline logins now expect two-factor authentication, and a tool built on logging in as you fights that at every step. “It caused my Qatar account to be locked…not worth the risk,” one Head for Points reader wrote. That was the sentence version of my ten-minute feeling.

I closed the app. I did not have a replacement.

The spreadsheet that almost worked

So I did what a large share of serious collectors quietly do: I built a spreadsheet. (When I later researched this properly, “spreadsheet” turned out to be the single most common thing people reach for when they leave a tracker — more common than any other app.)

The spreadsheet fixed the thing that had bothered me. It was mine. No passwords went anywhere. I typed in what I had, and it was private and under my control.

But a spreadsheet can’t do the things I actually wanted. It doesn’t tell me my total worth in euros, because that needs value data I’d have to research and maintain by hand for every programme. It doesn’t warn me before something expires. And it certainly doesn’t know that the Avios in my old British Airways account and any Avios sitting in Iberia or Finnair are the same currency — one balance wearing seven different jackets. I was maintaining rows. What I wanted was a portfolio.

I sketched out a little app to fix it. I called it Flajt. Then, like a lot of side ideas, I shelved it and got on with travelling.

A quiet evening in Åland

Six or seven months later, on a quiet evening in Åland — the islands out between Sweden and Finland — the idea came back, and this time it wouldn’t leave.

So I did the research properly. Not “would I use this,” but who else would, which programmes European collectors actually carry, and what the existing tools got wrong for people flying out of Stockholm and Málaga rather than Chicago and Newark. That research is, more or less, this entire project. Flajt became Gast: iOS-first, no credentials, EU-first, and deliberately focused on the programmes European collectors actually use instead of a US-centric list.

The name changed. The core conviction didn’t: you should be able to see everything you’ve earned without handing your passwords to anyone.

What Gast is now

What Gast is

Gast is an iOS app that tracks airline, hotel, and credit-card loyalty points for European collectors. It covers 30 loyalty programmes (17 airlines, 10 hotels, 3 cards) and never asks for your loyalty-account passwords — you add balances by manual entry or Google Sheet import, with screenshot (OCR) and email-statement import available on Gast Plus. Points earned across the seven Avios programmes are shown as a single balance. Gast is free to use, with an optional Gast Plus tier at €2.99/month or €29.99/year. All data is stored in the EU.

Source: Gast product specification. Last verified: [FOUNDER: verify date]

I built it around how the points actually work. Avios is the clearest example — seven airline and card programmes that share one balance — so Gast shows them as one number instead of seven. You add your balances yourself: manual entry and Google Sheet import are free; screenshot (OCR) import and email-statement import are there on Gast Plus. It shows your total worth using curated value ranges, tracks expiry and sends local notification alerts before points lapse, and handles 15 currencies. No signup, no account, no password ever requested.

Gast is free to use. Gast Plus is €2.99 a month or €29.99 a year, and it adds the parts I lean on most: a deterministic Points-or-Cash verdict (Plus), an AI Advisor you can ask “should I spend my miles on this, or pay cash?” in plain language (Plus), and the screenshot and email-statement import (Plus) that make setup faster.

I am also, genuinely, the target user. I collect Flying Blue (via Air France), SAS EuroBonus, Revolut RevPoints, Amex Membership Rewards, and Marriott Bonvoy. Gast tracks all five, and I open it every time I’m deciding whether to burn points or pay cash. If a feature doesn’t help me answer that question, it tends not to survive. You can see everything Gast does and the full list of 30 programmes if you want the detail.

Come build it with me

Gast is being built in the open. I post the decisions, the data I dig up, and the things that don’t work — roughly 3,000 people already follow along on LinkedIn (that’s my own follower count, not an audited number), and Reddit is where most of the arguing happens. If you’re a frequent flyer with opinions about what a points tracker should be, I want to hear them. Follow along on LinkedIn and Reddit — [FOUNDER: LinkedIn URL / Reddit handle].

The app isn’t in the App Store yet. It’s close.

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