A maintenance logbook by an owner, for owners.
I built OpenLogbooks for my Piper Cherokee 180.
Here it is, for yours.
Your aircraft’s maintenance history is too important to live in a vendor’s database or a single paper book in a hangar drawer. OpenLogbooks is a digital record that mirrors your paper logs, tracks every AD and § 91.417 line item, and lets you export everything — PDF, CSV, photos — any time, for any reason, at no charge.
Your logs, yours forever.
Open source · Self-hostable · Free for one aircraft, forever.
Built for the regs, not against them.
Every entry maps to the FAA citation that justifies it. The cumulative record updates itself. You don’t fight the software to stay legal.
§ 91.417 + § 43.11, covered
Inspection certifying statements generated to the letter of § 43.11(a). The § 91.417(a)(2) cumulative record assembles itself from your entries.
AD register, auto-built
Log an AD-compliance entry and the register adds itself. Recurring ADs carry forward with next-due dates. Manual rows are preserved across rebuilds.
Photos on every entry
Attach scans of the paper logbook page, Form 337s, parts receipts, and discrepancy lists. Photos live alongside the entry, in your storage, backed up with your data.
Export your records, free and forever
PDF reproductions of every logbook and the § 91.417 record with Form 337s inline — free for everyone, any time. CSV export is a Pro feature for accountants and spreadsheet workflows.
What you’ll actually see.
Three views from a live logbook — a seeded Cherokee 180 in our development database.
Free for one. Pro for more. Fleet for teams.
Three tiers, priced around what it costs to run this for you — modest VPS, modest backups, no investors, no growth-at-all-costs.
Free
For owner-operators with one airframe.
$0 forever
- 1 aircraft, unlimited entries
- Unlimited photos & attachments
- Full FAA compliance suite
- PDF export of every logbook
- Self-host the source code
Pro
For owners with more than one airframe, or who track costs.
Save $8/yr on annual.
$40 / year
Everything in Free, plus:
- Unlimited aircraft
- CSV export of any logbook
- Per-entry cost tracking + annual reports
- OCR for paper logbooks — soon
- Shareable “for sale” page — soon
Fleet
For flight clubs, rental ops, and multi-user fleets.
Contact us
Everything in Pro, plus:
- Multi-user access with roles
- Shared aircraft across the team
- Centralized billing & statements
- Custom onboarding & data import
- Email us to join the beta
No trial period — cancel any time from your account page. Every export, every feature, every byte of your data stays accessible on Free.
Questions worth answering up front.
The legal, the practical, and the “what if you disappear?”
Is this FAA-legal?
Yes. The FAA cares about the content of the entry — § 43.9 lays out what every maintenance record must contain (description, date, hours, signature, certificate kind & number), and § 43.11 adds the certifying-statement requirements for inspections. OpenLogbooks captures all of that as structured fields and generates the certifying statement for you.
By long-standing convention, your paper logbook remains the primary legal record. OpenLogbooks complements it — it isn’t a replacement and we don’t pretend otherwise.
What’s the legal record — this app or my paper logbook?
Your paper logbook is the primary record. OpenLogbooks is the cumulative § 91.417(a)(2) record (time in service, current AD status, list of major alterations) and a search / index / export aid over the handwritten entries you’ve already made. The app makes it easy to find, re-print, and hand over what an IA, buyer, or the FAA needs to see.
Can I export everything if I leave?
Yes. Free for every account, any time, no questions: PDF reproductions of every logbook, the cumulative § 91.417 record with Form 337 attachments inline, and a zip of every photo you’ve uploaded. That’s your complete record — everything an IA, a buyer, or the FAA would ask to see — and it leaves with you.
CSV export is a Pro feature, intended for accountants, spreadsheets, and tooling outside OpenLogbooks. It’s a convenience, not a record requirement. Data portability is a feature, not a punishment for leaving.
What if you shut down?
OpenLogbooks is open source on GitHub and self-hostable. If the hosted service ever disappears, the code doesn’t — clone the repo, drop your exported data into it, and you’re running the same software on your own machine. Your PDFs and CSVs work without the hosted service at all.
Can I self-host?
Yes. The whole thing is a single Rails app with a SQLite database — clone
the GitHub repo,
follow the README, and you’re running it locally in under five minutes.
Photos live on disk, the database is one file, backups are cp.
Can I import from a paper logbook?
Not yet — but it’s the next big thing we’re building. Paper-logbook OCR (snap photos of your handwritten pages, get structured draft entries to review and confirm) is on the Pro roadmap. We’d rather say so than over-promise it.
In the meantime, you can manually enter past entries via the New Entry form. OpenLogbooks preserves them indefinitely and the cumulative § 91.417 record updates itself as you go.
Is my data private?
Yes. We don’t put PII in analytics — the
Openlogbooks::Analytics module has a hard-coded forbidden-keys guard
that refuses to send emails, names, tail numbers, or anything that could
identify you. Your data lives on a dedicated VPS we operate ourselves;
there are no ads, no third-party data sale, no “marketing partners.”
What’s coming next?
A short, honest roadmap:
- OCR for paper logbooks — snap a photo of a handwritten page, get a structured draft entry to review.
- Shareable “for sale” page — a buyer-friendly read-only view of your aircraft’s records, accessible via a signed link you control.
- Email magic-link signup — for people who’d rather not use a Google, GitHub, or Discord login.
We’d rather ship three features well than ten badly.
Your logs, yours forever.
Log your next entry in OpenLogbooks.
One aircraft, free forever. Upgrade only when you need more.
Get started free