[8] The site was modelled after a volunteer group in the United States with a similar name, VaccineHunter.org, during the American rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines.

However, there were reports of verbal abuse of staff due to large volumes of people flooding the clinics, many were ineligible.

[22] By November 2021, the founders estimated that they had been directly or indirectly responsible for helping 1.2 million Canadians receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

[25][26][27][28][29][30] The effort was an approach to making sure no appointment slots were left unbooked and to prevent vaccine wastage.

[34] FYI is a multilingual tool, available in 22 languages, that facilitates and simplifies the process of finding vaccine appointments by aggregating data from multiple sources and incorporating it into a streamlined service.

The service collected data through web scraping along with manual reporting by pharmacists and vaccine administrators.

[35] Vaccine Hunters Canada claims that the service handled over 100,000 searches per day,[35] and was used by at least a million people.