Hangar Addons is a flight simulation community and resource built for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and X-Plane 12.
It's a place to find and share addons, create liveries, build and discover flight plans, create and manage Virtual Airlines, and connect with other people who enjoy flight simulation.
Free means free
Hangar Addons was built around a simple idea: accessing freeware shouldn't require paying for a subscription or fighting through artificial restrictions designed to make the free experience frustrating.
We will never force you to watch an advertisement before downloading an addon or viewing a flight plan. We won't throttle download speeds to push you toward a paid tier, put downloads behind countdown timers, or require you to create an account just to download something.
No premium download speeds. No "wait 15 seconds." No forced ads. No signup required to download.
That's not going to change.
Keeping the site running
We also want to be transparent about what it costs to operate Hangar Addons.
Our infrastructure currently costs roughly $1,400 per month for dedicated bandwidth which is a constant cost that will not go up or down as we have a dedicated enterprise fiber optic circuit, plus approximately $200–$300 per month in power for the servers and networking equipment that run the site.
That's about $1,600–$1,700 every month before considering development time or anything else.
Eventually, we will introduce advertising to help offset those costs. When we do, ads will be designed around the site rather than the site being designed around the ads.
That means no pop-ups, no forced ad views, no ads blocking downloads, no countdown timers, and no intentionally degraded experience for people who aren't paying us. Ads will be simple, unobtrusive placements such as banners, sidebars, or placements between content.
The site should remain enjoyable to use whether you interact with an advertisement or completely ignore it.
A future marketplace for creators
We also plan to introduce a marketplace where addon creators can choose to sell their payware directly through Hangar Addons.
This will be completely separate from the freeware library. Freeware will remain free, and creators will decide whether their own work is offered for free or sold as payware.
When the marketplace launches, we plan to keep our commission at just 10% of each sale.
We're not interested in taking a huge percentage of a creator's work. The commission is intended to help cover the infrastructure, bandwidth, payment processing, and other costs involved in operating the platform while allowing creators to keep the vast majority of what they earn.
Our goal is to give developers another place to distribute their work without Hangar Addons becoming the expensive middleman.
More than an addon library
Hangar Addons isn't intended to be just another place to download files. We're building tools around the flight simulation community itself.
Addons
Browse and share aircraft, scenery, liveries, utilities, and other content for MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024, and X-Plane 12.
Our addon library supports versioned releases and is designed to make it easy for creators to publish and maintain their work while making it easy for users to find what they're looking for.
Livery Studio
Our Livery Studio lets you create aircraft liveries directly from your browser without needing to manually build and package everything yourself.
You can work with text, registrations, images, shapes, gradients, stripes, paint and drawing tools, custom fonts, layers, groups, templates, colors, aircraft regions, and more.
Creators can use supported aircraft already available in the studio or upload a custom aircraft model to work with.
When you're finished, Hangar Addons takes care of the exporting and packaging needed to use the livery in Microsoft Flight Simulator. You can download the finished package for yourself or release your creation directly to the Hangar Addons addon library.
The Livery Studio is still growing, and we plan to continue adding aircraft, tools, and capabilities over time.
Virtual Airlines
Hangar Addons also includes a complete Virtual Airlines platform for communities that want to organize and fly together.
Virtual Airlines can create their own presence on Hangar Addons with a logo, banner, description, ICAO code, fleet information, recruitment settings, and membership management.
VA administrators can manage their fleet, associate aircraft and other addons from the Hangar Addons library with their airline, and connect flight plans created on the site.
Airlines can choose how membership works from Open, Request to Join, Invite Only, or Closed, and independently set their recruitment status to Open, Paused, or Closed.
Our goal is to continue expanding Virtual Airlines into a much larger part of Hangar Addons, including additional flight tracking and community tools.
Flight Plans
Create and discover flight plans based on published navaids and airways rather than simply drawing a straight line between two airports.
Flight plans can also work alongside other parts of Hangar Addons, including Virtual Airlines.
Forums & Community
Hangar Addons includes community forums for simulator news, addon releases, support, suggestions, bug reports, general discussion, and everything else surrounding the hobby.
We're building Hangar Addons as a community first, with the addon library and tools supporting that community rather than existing simply to generate page views.
Why
Most flight simulation add-on sites that came before Hangar Addons eventually leaned on things like download timers, ad walls, premium download speeds, subscriptions, or other artificial restrictions to generate revenue.
We think there's a better way.
Hangar Addons needs to be financially sustainable, but sustainability doesn't have to come at the expense of the people using it.
We'd rather be transparent about what the site costs to operate, use reasonable advertising to help pay those bills, and build services that provide actual value to creators and the community.
Who's behind this
Hangar Addons is built and run by me, Michael Geise. By trade I'm a Principal Engineer with over 15 years of experience building web, mobile, desktop, and cloud-based software.
Long before Hangar Addons, I spent more than 15 years running NFSCars, a Need for Speed community site that grew into one of the largest hubs in that community for custom cars, tools, downloads, and discussion, serving millions of downloads along the way.
Eventually that chapter closed and I stepped away to raise a family. Flight simulation, though, has been a constant since I first sat down with Flight Simulator for Windows 95, I've been an aviation enthusiast for as long as I can remember.
I've been out of the community-building scene for a while now, following the loss of our oldest daughter. Getting back to building something useful for a community I care about is exactly what's pulled me back in, and I'm genuinely glad to be here doing it again.
Hangar Addons is still young, and there's a lot more I want to build. My goal isn't to squeeze as much money as possible out of the people who use it. It's to build something useful, sustainable, and worthy of becoming a long term home for the flight simulation community.
Questions
Transparency matters to us. If you have a question about how Hangar Addons operates, how we fund the site, or something that isn't behaving the way this page says it should, please contact us.