MyFlyRight

We Turned a jQuery Prototype Into a €100M Legal Machine

In 2016, MyFlyRight came to us with a product built on jQuery. It worked. It was also full of bugs, difficult to extend, and not ready for the scale the business needed. We considered it a prototype, not a product.

We paired with a senior designer (20 years of experience) and built the platform from scratch. React frontend. Laravel backend. PostgreSQL database. Custom hosting with proper DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and dev/staging environments from day one.

The platform has now processed over 1 million claims. It has recovered more than €100 million in compensation for EU air passengers. MyFlyRight is one of the top 10 Hamburg-based startups in Germany.

We have been their engineering partner for nearly 10 years.

What the Platform Does

EU Regulation 261/2004 entitles passengers to €250-€600 in compensation when their flight is delayed, cancelled, or they are denied boarding. The regulation applies to all flights departing from the EU and all EU airline flights arriving into the EU. The rules are universal across the European Union, which simplifies the legal logic.

MyFlyRight automates the entire claims process.

The Claims Wizard

The core of the platform is a complex wizard that guides passengers through a series of questions. The flow is algorithm-driven: the next question depends on the previous answers. Users do not follow a fixed linear path. They move through a decision tree that assesses eligibility in real time.

At the end of the flow, the passenger receives one of two outcomes: eligible or not eligible for submission. No ambiguity. No “we’ll review your case and get back to you.” The algorithm makes the determination.

The wizard talks to multiple APIs under the hood: airline databases for flight data validation, scheduling information, and disruption records. It applies the legal framework of EU 261/2004 to the specific facts of each case. It handles the edge cases that make airline claims complicated: connecting flights through multiple airports, codeshare arrangements, extraordinary circumstances defenses, and the evolving case law from European Court of Justice rulings.

Legal Routing

Eligible cases go directly to a lawyer’s desk. The platform bundles the claims submission with a legal assistance framework where eligible cases are automatically routed to the appropriate legal team. The case stays in the CRM and e-commerce system for the purpose of communicating with the customer, tracking status, and managing compensation disbursement.

Court filing automation works across all EU jurisdictions. The EU is a single market with a single legal framework covering airline passenger rights. There are procedural differences between member states, but the platform works through them. The system is fully automated for standard cases. Custom or unusual cases are flagged and handled separately.

What Makes It Hard

The hardest engineering problem was not the legal logic or the API integrations. It was the back button.

The claims wizard is non-linear. Users move through an algorithm-driven flow where each screen depends on previous answers. When a user clicks back, either the wizard’s own back button or the browser’s back button, the system must return them to the correct position in that non-linear flow. Not the previous screen in the DOM. The correct previous step in their specific path through the decision tree.

This sounds simple. It is not. The algorithm has branching paths, conditional steps, and states that depend on combinations of prior answers. Navigating backward through a branching algorithm while maintaining state, without corrupting the user’s progress, and without breaking the browser’s native navigation expectations, took the most iteration of any feature in the platform.

The Numbers

€100M+ recovered. The milestone was reached around 2025, after COVID-era travel disruptions drove a massive increase in eligible claims.

1 million+ claims processed. From initial submission through eligibility assessment, legal routing, and resolution.

All EU airlines. Every airline operating under EU jurisdiction.

All EU member state jurisdictions. Court filings across the entire European Union.

Top 10 Hamburg-based startup. MyFlyRight is recognized as one of the leading startups in Hamburg, Germany.

How It Evolved

Year one was essentially V1: the rebuilt platform replacing the jQuery prototype. The architecture was designed correctly from the start, which meant there were no major rewrites, framework migrations, or architectural overhauls over the next decade. The product evolved through design improvements, frontend engineering refinement, and continuous enhancement of the claims algorithm and legal framework integration.

The team peaked at 5-7 EltexSoft engineers (backend, frontend, QA, project management) led by our technical lead who served as de facto CTO on the engagement. Peak team size was in the period before COVID (pre-2020). Since then, the engagement has continued with a smaller team focused on continuous improvement and platform optimization.

The proper architecture layout in V1 is why the platform has run for nearly 10 years without a rewrite. That is not luck. It is the result of building the right abstractions in the first year and resisting the temptation to over-engineer what was not yet needed.

What We Learned

One lesson from nearly 10 years on this engagement: dive into the product first. Understand how the business logic works before you write any code. MyFlyRight is not a typical web application. It is a legal automation system with domain-specific logic that governs every user interaction. An engineer who starts coding before understanding EU 261/2004, the claims lifecycle, and the airline dispute process will build the wrong thing.

The other lesson: some incidents required all hands on deck, weekends and late nights included. AWS outages, critical claim processing deadlines, and the kind of production emergencies that come with running a system that handles real money for real passengers. Ten years of partnership means ten years of shared responsibility when things go wrong at 2 AM.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique software engineering studio. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

MyFlyRight is our longest-running client engagement and our deepest LegalTech reference. We also build for FinTech, FoodTech, HealthTech, and eCommerce. Our tech stacks include Laravel, React, Vue, Django, iOS, and Android.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years. MyFlyRight has been with us for nearly 10.

30-minute technical call. Bring your LegalTech idea, your claims automation challenge, or your complex wizard flow. We’ll tell you what we’d build and what we wouldn’t.

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