Comparison · competitor data retrieved 2026-08-24
FlightPowers vs SerpApi for Google Flights data
SerpApi is the default answer when someone asks “how do I get Google Flights data.” It is a good product, it is well documented, and for a lot of teams it is the right choice. This page is about the cases where it is not.
All competitor figures below were read from SerpApi’s own live pages on 2026-08-24 and are quoted rather than paraphrased. If a number here disagrees with their site today, believe their site.
The one-paragraph version
A platform and a specialist
SerpApi is a general-purpose Google scraping platform: Google Flights is one of several dozen engines on the same subscription and the same credit pool. FlightPowers is a flights-and-hotels specialist. If you need Google Search, Maps, Shopping and Flights, SerpApi is one vendor and one bill, and that convenience is worth real money. If flights are the product, you are paying general-purpose prices for a specialist job, and round-trips cost you double.
Pricing
Pricing, side by side
Their table quoted from their pricing page; ours rendered from the same data that drives our /pricing page.
SerpApi
| Plan | Price | Searches / month | Throughput |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 / month | 250 searches per month | 50 / hour |
| Starter | $25 / month | 1,000 searches per month | 200 / hour |
| Developer | $75 / month | 5,000 searches per month | 1,000 / hour |
| Production | $150 / month | 15,000 searches per month | 3,000 / hour |
| Big Data | $275 / month | 30,000 searches per month | 6,000 / hour |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom | Custom |
FlightPowers (Google Flights Live API)
| Plan | Price / mo | Requests | $ / 1k req | Overage | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | Free | 10 / mo | — | hard cap | — |
| PRO | $10 | 2,500 / mo | $4.00 | $0.003 / req | 150 / min |
| ULTRArecommended | $25 | 10,000 / mo | $2.50 | $0.003 / req | 250 / min |
| MEGA | $50 | 50,000 / mo | $1.00 | $0.001 / req | 500 / min |
Every plan includes every endpoint. You only choose volume and rate limit. Read from the live listing on 2026-08-26; the listing is authoritative.
Cost per search, on published list prices
| Plan | Cost per search |
|---|---|
| SerpApi Starter | $0.025 |
| SerpApi Developer | $0.015 |
| SerpApi Production | $0.010 |
| SerpApi Big Data | $0.0092 |
| FlightPowers PRO | $0.0040 |
| FlightPowers ULTRA | $0.0025 |
| FlightPowers MEGA | $0.0010 |
Two caveats, in SerpApi’s favour and worth stating plainly:
- SerpApi’s credits are fungible across all their engines. A comparison of flights-only cost against a general-purpose credit understates what the credit buys.
- SerpApi counts only successful searches. Their FAQ: “Only successful searches are counted toward your monthly searches. Cached, errored, and failed searches are not.” That is a genuinely customer-friendly billing policy.
The largest practical gap
Round-trips: one request or two
Not a matter of opinion. It is in SerpApi’s own parameter documentation.
“To obtain the returning flight information for Round Trip (1), you need to make another request using a departure_token.”So a round-trip search on SerpApi is a two-request flow: search the outbound, take a departure_token off a chosen result, search again for the matching returns. Two requests, two credits, two round-trips of latency, and state to carry in between. On FlightPowers, POST /v1/flights/roundtrip is a single call that returns paired legs and a combined total in one object:
{
"total_price": "$119",
"total_price_as_number": 119,
"total_duration_seconds": 12900,
"total_stops": 0,
"buy_link": "https://www.google.com/travel/flights?tfs=...",
"departure_flight_airline": "easyJet",
"departure_flight_duration": "1 hr 50 min",
"return_flight_airline": "easyJet",
"return_flight_duration": "1 hr 45 min"
}| Per round-trip search | |
|---|---|
| SerpApi Developer (2 credits) | $0.030 |
| FlightPowers ULTRA (1 credit) | $0.0025 |
There is a real trade here, though. SerpApi’s two-step flow lets a user pick a specific outbound and then see returns priced against that choice, exactly how Google Flights’ own UI behaves. If you are building an interactive booking flow with that interaction model, their design fits it and ours does not. Ours is built for the “price this trip” question, not the “let me choose leg by leg” question.
Capabilities
Feature by feature, in prose
No tick marks: each cell says what is actually documented, and by whom.
| SerpApi | FlightPowers | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Google Search, Maps, Shopping, Hotels, Images, Scholar and more on one key and one credit pool. If flights are one feature of a bigger product, consolidating on one vendor is worth paying for. | Flights and hotels only. Nothing else: that is the trade this whole page is about. |
| Price context | Richer history: their price_insights object carries lowest_price, price_level, typical_price_range and price_history, an array of [timestamp, price] pairs you can chart directly. | The band and the verdict: price_insights_low/high plus Google’s low | typical | high call on every result (the alerting trigger), but no history series. See it proven → |
| Round-trip | A two-request flow via departure_token, per their own docs, which also enables a pick-your-outbound interaction model ours cannot express. | One paired-leg request with a combined total and per-leg filters. Round-trip API → |
| Empty results | Handled at the billing layer: only successful searches count toward quota (their FAQ, quoted above). We have not evaluated how their responses distinguish “no flights” from a search that failed. | Handled at the response layer: every search reports X-Search-Status (ok | empty | partial | degraded), and an empty array is only reported as the answer when the page it came from positively said so. Opt-in strict: true turns a degraded search into an HTTP 503. Search status → |
| Throughput | Published hourly, described as guaranteed: 1,000/hour on Developer up to 6,000/hour on Big Data. A guarantee is a stronger form of commitment than a rate limit. | Published per minute: 150/min on the $10 plan up to 500/min on the $50 plan. For bursty workloads like scanning a 31-date month the moment a user asks, a per-minute ceiling in the hundreds is the shape you want. We publish a limit, not a guarantee. Parallel scans → |
| Itinerary breadth | Multi-city via type=3 with multi_city_json; travel_class covers Economy, Premium economy, Business and First; a carbon_emissions object per itinerary. | One-way and round-trip only: no multi-city or open-jaw. seat_type documents Economy and Business only. No emissions data at all; for anything with a sustainability angle that is close to disqualifying for us. |
| Legal | They advertise a “U.S. Legal Shield [that] provides up to $2 million in coverage for the scraping and parsing of search engine data, as long as your use … is not illegal.” For a company whose legal team asks about scraping exposure, that clause may end the evaluation on its own, reasonably. | No equivalent indemnity. |
| AI agents | We are not aware of a comparable first-party MCP endpoint from SerpApi (a statement about what we found, not proof of absence). | First-party hosted MCP servers for flights and hotels: point an MCP-capable host at https://flights.flightpowers.com/mcp with your key and search becomes a native tool. MCP setup → |
| Hotels by market | SerpApi has a Google Hotels engine; we did not find a per-country residential-proxy equivalent in their documentation, but we have not verified its absence. Treat this as “ours has it,” not “theirs does not.” | The companion Booking.com API accepts proxy_country: the same room priced as a US, German or Israeli visitor sees it, for rate-parity monitoring. Geo-pricing → |
One more FlightPowers-side note that is not a feature row: the own-domain front (api.flightpowers.com) holds no server-side API key: it forwards yours upstream and returns the response unchanged. It is a pass-through, not a shared gateway reselling one pooled key, so no other customer’s traffic can exhaust your limit.
The decision
Which should you pick
Choose SerpApi when
- You need more Google surfaces than flights: one vendor, one bill.
- You want price history charted without building it.
- Multi-city itineraries or carbon emissions matter to your product.
- Premium economy or first class must be searchable.
- Your legal team wants the indemnity clause.
Choose FlightPowers when
- Flights (and hotels) are the product and unit economics care about cost per search.
- Round-trips are a large share of your searches: one request, not two.
- You scan date ranges in bursts and want per-minute headroom.
- You are wiring the data into an AI agent over MCP.
- You need per-country hotel rate comparison.
Plenty of teams run both: SerpApi for general Google surfaces, a specialist for the flight path that carries the volume.
Try it
One command, no token dance
curl -X POST https://api.flightpowers.com/v1/flights/roundtrip \
-H "x-api-key: $FLIGHTPOWERS_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"from_airport": "JFK",
"to_airport": "LHR",
"departure_date": "2026-10-15",
"return_date": "2026-10-22"
}'There is a free tier (10 requests/month, hard cap: enough to verify your key, not to evaluate). The full walkthrough is in How to get real-time Google Flights data.
Questions, answered plainly
- Is FlightPowers cheaper than SerpApi?
- On published list prices, per flight search, yes at every tier: $0.0025 per search on our $25 plan against $0.015 on SerpApi’s $75 plan (their figures retrieved 2026-08-24). Two honest caveats in SerpApi’s favour: their credits are fungible across all their Google engines, so a flights-only comparison understates what the credit buys, and they only count successful searches toward quota.
- Does FlightPowers return price history like SerpApi?
- No. SerpApi’s price_insights object includes a price_history array of [timestamp, price] pairs; we return the band (price_insights_low / price_insights_high) and Google’s low | typical | high verdict, but no history series. If you want to chart a fare’s past without accumulating it yourself, SerpApi hands it to you and we do not.
- Why are round-trips cheaper on FlightPowers?
- SerpApi’s own documentation describes round-trip as a two-request flow: search the outbound, then use a departure_token to fetch matching returns. Our POST /v1/flights/roundtrip returns paired legs and a combined total in a single call, so a round-trip costs one request instead of two.
- Can I use both APIs together?
- Plenty of teams do: SerpApi for general Google surfaces (Search, Maps, Shopping), a flights specialist for the flight path that carries the volume. Nothing about either product prevents it.
- Where do the SerpApi numbers on this page come from?
- From serpapi.com/pricing and serpapi.com/google-flights-api, read on 2026-08-24 and quoted rather than paraphrased. If a number here disagrees with their site today, believe their site.
Specialist prices for a specialist job
Live Google Flights data with the price band and verdict on every result, and round-trips that cost one request, not two.
Free tier: 10 requests/month. No card to try.