A small app built to answer one question: is the air OK today?

Why I built it

A couple of wildfire seasons ago, I kept finding myself standing at the window trying to decide whether it was safe to open it, go for a run, or send the kids outside. The answers existed somewhere — buried in dense government dashboards, scattered across half a dozen sites, or hidden behind a daily average that was already hours stale by the time I read it.

I wanted one clear number for my city, refreshed often, that would just tap me on the shoulder when the air turned bad — smoke drifting in, pollen spiking, a heat advisory landing. Nothing fancy. So I started building it for myself, and Aircaster is what it grew into.

The whole idea is simple: turn the air around you into something you can act on, then stay quiet until it actually matters.

What Aircaster does

It pulls real-time air-quality readings, pollen and allergy forecasts, and severe-weather and wildfire-smoke advisories for the places you care about, and pushes a notification to your phone the moment something crosses a threshold you set. You pin your home, your office, a parent's town across the country — and it watches all of them so you don't have to.

Readings come from public, government-grade monitoring networks, shown on the standard US AQI scale with the same color language everywhere, so a single glance tells you where today lands.

It's a small, independent project

There's no team, no office, no investors, and no plan to sell your attention to advertisers. It's one developer maintaining something they actually use every day. That shapes everything: the app stays lean, the privacy policy is short because there isn't much to collect, and the notifications stay quiet because I don't want to be annoyed by my own app either.

If you find it useful, that genuinely makes my week. If something's broken or missing, I'd honestly like to hear about it — it's usually me reading the email.

Get in touch

Questions, bug reports, a feature you wish it had, or a city you want covered next — write to support@aircaster.app. It reaches me directly.