For a community that runs on free liveries, scenery, and aircraft, the question of where all that freeware lives has become tense as of late. Download timers, ad walls, and premium tiers have crept into the places simmers rely on, and more than one developer has walked away from the biggest hub over how their work was being handled.
Into that mood steps Hangar Addons, a new community platform for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, MSFS 2024, and X-Plane that is built around a single promise: everything stays free, and nothing stands between you and the download.
The promise is very direct. The site says it will never make you sit through an advertisement before a download, never throttle speeds to push a paid upgrade, and never introduce a premium tier, because there isn’t one. Right now it carries no advertising at all, which the developer says is a deliberate choice. He has said some reasonable advertising may arrive later to offset costs, with a promise that it will never be forced and never sit between a user and a download. The most the about page describes is plain inline advertising in a sidebar or between posts, with no pop-ups, no forced pre-roll, and no countdown timers.
Alongside the add-on library, which covers aircraft, scenery, and utilities searchable by simulator and category, there are community forums and a flight planning section that the developer says builds routes from published navaids and airways.
It’s clearly a direct answer to the complaints that have followed the larger add-on sites for a while now. Flightsim.to, the dominant freeware repository, spent part of 2023 dealing with a developer boycott after it introduced a premium membership and revenue-sharing program, and it has faced renewed criticism this year over how freeware is packaged and sold. Hangar Addons is positioning itself as the opposite of that model, and it says so plainly.
An open call to creators
Rather than build the library first and hope developers follow, the site’s founder has gone to the community directly. In a post on the official MSFS forums, he put out an open call for creators to let Hangar Addons host and distribute their work, and set out the terms in plain language. Creators keep full ownership of their work. They get credit and a link to their own site, Discord, or profile. Existing licensing and distribution requirements are respected, only content a creator specifically authorizes gets hosted, and anything can be removed at the creator’s request.
For developers who would rather keep hosting their own files, he offered to simply link to their existing download location instead.
Who is behind it
The person building it is Michael Geise, who describes himself as a principal engineer with more than 15 years in software. He is not new to running community sites, either. He previously operated NFSCars, a hub in the Need for Speed modding scene that at its peak, by his own account, hosted more than 50,000 community-made cars and drew over 20 million page views a month before he stepped away. That site still runs today under the name NFSAddons, and he says he has also run a flight-sim site before under the name FSX Addons. Managing a freeware community at scale, in other words, is familiar ground for him.
Got Friends signs on
A new platform lives or dies on whether creators show up, and Hangar Addons has a recognizable one early. Got Friends, the developer behind a long list of well-received aircraft, announced that three of its freeware projects, the Got Friends Legacy Collection, the Fokker Dr.1, and the Discus-2c Standard, are now hosted on the site. If the Legacy Collection sounds familiar, we covered its arrival on the MSFS Marketplace back in 2023.
Got Friends was among the developers who pulled content during the 2023 Flightsim.to boycott, so its decision to back a fresh community platform is not a random endorsement. The team described the move as supporting a community project rather than a full exit from anywhere else, and said it wanted to give the site a real chance rather than simply wish it well.
The alternative the community needs?
The way flight sim freeware gets distributed is changing. Over the past year, developers have increasingly moved toward their own channels and away from depending on one central hub. Hangar Addons is a slightly different case, a new independent site rather than a first-party store, but it is pushing in the same direction, toward distribution that puts the creator’s terms first.
None of this makes it a finished product, and it does not pretend to be. The site is only days into public life and its catalog is still small. What it has going for it right now is a clear promise, a founder who has run this kind of site before and is saying all the right things, and at least one well-known developer willing to test it. You can take a look at the site here. We’ll be keeping an eye on where it goes!
