Starting today, Flying Fries add-ons can be bought directly from flyingfries.com. This is not a strategic pivot, and it is not me walking away from anybody. It is one more place to buy the same aircraft at the same price, with one difference that matters a great deal to a studio my size: almost all of the money reaches the studio.

Here is how it works.

What does not change

Nothing has been pulled from anywhere. The XF-11, the Gabriel, the Quasar and the rest stay on the MSFS Marketplace, on Flightsim.to, on SimMarket, on Orbx, etc. Those partners give Flying Fries an audience it could never reach alone, and several of them offer things I simply cannot match: a unified library, an installer, and console purchases.

New versions ship everywhere at the same time. I do not hold an update back for my own store. In practice a given store may take a day or two to process the file on its side. That already happens today, and it has nothing to do with where you bought the add-on.

Who actually sells you the add-on

Not me. Not Flying Fries. This is the part I most want to be clear about.

The store runs on Polar, acting as merchant of record. That is a legal status, not a technical footnote: Polar is the seller. It calculates, collects and remits VAT in every country. It issues the invoice. It handles refunds and disputes. It hosts the files you download.

Which means your card number, your billing address and your payment details never pass through flyingfries.com and never land in my hands. There is nothing for me to secure, because there is nothing for me to hold. When a website tells you your payment data is safe with them, that is a promise you have to take on trust. Here the question simply does not arise, and I find that far more reassuring than any promise I could make.

For a one-person studio, this is what makes selling direct possible at all. The obstacle was never the code. It was international tax compliance, and absorbing that is precisely what a merchant of record exists for.

The account is optional, and here is what it is for

You do not need an account to buy anything. Buy, download, done. You can return to your Polar customer portal at any time and download again, as often as you like, for as long as you like.

So why offer accounts at all? Mainly for one reason: Polar does not email you when a new version ships. If you bought the Quasar in March and I release an update in September, nothing tells you. You have to remember to go and look.

An account on flyingfries.com fixes exactly that. When I publish an update to something you own, you get a short email: the version number, the full changelog, and a link to your account page. The link points at your account, never at a file, so it still works six months later. Every one of those emails carries an unsubscribe link that switches the notices off without touching your account.

Your account page always offers the current version, and only the current version. No archive list, no wondering which file is the right one.

Creating the account takes one field: your email address. There is no password. You receive a single-use link by email, valid for fifteen minutes, and  you stay signed in for 90 rolling days (this counter resets with each connection). Nothing to invent, nothing to forget, nothing to reset, and nothing stored on my side that could ever be stolen.

Up to six email addresses

Over the years you may have bought using more than one address: a personal one, a work one, one you used once and abandoned. Your account can hold up to six email addresses.

Adding one works exactly like signing in. From your account page you enter the other address, you receive a link there, you click it, and every purchase made with that address is retrieved from Polar and attached automatically. No support ticket, no order number to dig out of an old mailbox. If you can still read the inbox, the purchases are yours.

Removing an address is the one clumsy part, and I would rather say so than quietly hope nobody notices: there is no unlink button. You delete your flyingfries.com account and create it again with the addresses you actually want. Nothing is lost in the process. Your purchases live at Polar, not with me, and they come back on their own as you attach each address.

You can even click "Find my Purchases" at anytime, to resync your flyingfries.com account with Polar.

What I do not collect

If you buy without creating an account, flyingfries.com keeps nothing about you. Not your address, not your order, not a line in a technical log. That is not an oversight, it is a direct consequence of not being the seller: I have no legal reason to hold any of it, so I hold none of it. The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: without an account, you will not receive update notices. Create one later and your earlier purchases are found and attached anyway.

The rest follows the same line. No audience measurement, no advertising trackers. No cookie is set at all until you sign in, and that was verified route by route rather than assumed. Download logs are erased after twelve months. An account with no sign-in for three years is deleted. Deleting your account erases everything on my side, purchase history included, and your add-ons stay reachable because Polar keeps its own records.

None of this depends on me remembering to do it. It runs as a scheduled task. The full detail is on the privacy page.

One precision on scope: everything above describes flyingfries.com and nothing else. What Polar keeps, as the actual seller with actual accounting obligations, is their business and documented on their side.

Buying as a company

If you are buying for a flight school, a hardware manufacturer, a software developer, or simply through your own company, the checkout handles it natively. Tick the box, enter your company name and your EU VAT number, and the number is verified and reverse charge applied automatically. No VAT to pay, and an invoice your accountant can actually use.

This cost me no work whatsoever, it comes with Polar, and remarkably few MSFS add-on stores offer it. If it spares one person a painful expense claim, it was worth a paragraph!

About the price

Prices are displayed excluding tax, and labeled as such. The XF-11 reads "$26.99 on this site, excl. tax". VAT depends on where you are, and it is calculated at the payment screen before you commit to anything.

Notice that for a product you already bought and linked on flyingfries.com, the "Get it now!" turns into "Download!"... Classy ;)

The words "on this site" are deliberate too, because a price belongs to a channel rather than to a product. The Scrapyard Monster is free here and on Flightsim.to, and paid on the Marketplace, because that paid version is what funds the console port for players who have no access to free add-ons.

Now the question I know is coming: If selling direct earns a bigger margin, why not sell cheaper here?

Because a discount would do two things I do not want. It would put my distribution partners in an awkward position, selling the same aircraft at a higher price than the developer does. And it would buy your decision instead of earning it: I would rather you choose this store knowing exactly what that means, and pay what you would have paid anywhere else, than be nudged here by two dollars.

Identical pre-tax prices on every channel. That is the entire policy.

The margin, and why I am telling you about it

Every store takes a cut. 30% on the Marketplace, 25% on Flightsim.to. That is not a scandal. It is the price of the audience, the infrastructure and the payment handling they provide, and it is money honestly earned.

When selling direct (that is, through Polar), about 92% of the displayed price reaches the studio, against 70% through the Marketplace. Actually, in both cases there are still taxes to pay at the end of the year, since this is all officially declared income, and I do not live in the Cayman Islands!

Damn... I should really consider moving here!

These figures are not state secrets. They are just rarely said out loud. I am saying them because I would rather you decide with the information than without it. Buying here supports Flying Fries the most, by a wide margin. Buying anywhere else still supports it, still keeps the studio running, and I am genuinely grateful either way. I do not expect this store to make Flying Fries rich, and I am not building it to chase volume. It exists so that people who want to support the work directly have a clean way to do it, with a great user experience.

What this store does not do yet

PC only. There is no console path here and there never will be, because console add-ons go through the Marketplace by design. If you fly on Xbox, the Marketplace remains your route, and that is exactly as it should be.

Installation is manual. You download a zip and drop the folder into your Community folder. No installer, no library manager, no update check running on your machine.

Somewhere in 2027, I want to build a proper Flying Fries application: a package manager for the add-ons you bought or picked up free from this store, handling installation and updates for you. The technical study is done and it looks workable. It also carries real software certification costs, which is why I am calling it an intention and not a date. When it arrives, it will be because it is ready.

No grand opening!

The catalog opens gradually. At launch you will find our freeware plus the XF-11. The Gabriel and the Quasar follow a bit later, once I have watched a few real payments run with real customers rather than test cards. Everything released after that goes up on its release day. Opening progressively is what will allow us to revalidate everything a few more times.

Because, yes, the thing was tested properly before anyone was let near it: full campaigns from purchase to refund, account creation, deletion and rebuild, all replayed automatically on every change. Access revocation after a refund works, including the case of someone deleting and recreating their account to try to get it back. I will spare you the numbers. The point is that the store was built with the same pipeline as the aircraft, not assembled over a weekend.

If something goes wrong

Refunds, invoices and payment problems go through Polar, since they are the seller and they are equipped for it.

This is a refund issued from the sandbox environment, during our tests. But it worked perfectly fine!

But if you are unsure, or something looks wrong, or you would rather ask us first, use the contact form with the purchase topic preselected. I will get your message and respond to it.

One last thing

The store is natively incorporated into the existing catalog and products page of flyingfries.com. It is not a new section on the website; it has all been added as smoothly as possible.

Whichever way you choose to buy, thank you for flying our aircraft.