Comparison · competitor data retrieved 2026-08-24
FlightPowers vs Duffel
These two products get compared a lot and they should not be. Duffel is a booking platform: you can issue a real ticket through it. FlightPowers is a data API: you can find out what a trip costs. Which one you need comes down to one question: are you selling travel, or are you telling people about travel?
All Duffel figures were read from duffel.com/pricing on 2026-08-24 and are quoted rather than paraphrased. If a number here disagrees with their site today, believe their site.
The decisive difference
Duffel can sell a ticket. FlightPowers cannot.
Duffel gives you real bookable airline inventory, order creation, ancillaries, and their own IATA accreditation so you do not need your own. From their pricing page:
“If you have your own accreditation and would like to use it please contact us to discuss pricing and next steps. Alternatively, you can use our accreditation through our Managed Content. This includes access to our 5 IATAs worldwide with no need for any accreditation.”
That is a genuinely hard problem solved, and nothing on our side substitutes for it. FlightPowers returns a buy_link, a deep link that opens the exact itinerary on Google Flights, where the traveller completes the purchase somewhere else. If you need the transaction to happen inside your product, stop reading and go to Duffel.
Their model
Duffel’s pricing: orders pay, search rides along
Quoted from their pricing page. A well-designed model for a travel seller.
| Item | Charge |
|---|---|
| Orders | “This fee is charged monthly for every confirmed order. $3.00 per order” |
| Managed Content | “This fee is charged monthly for every confirmed order. 1% total order value” |
| Excess search | “$0.005 per excess search”, above “a search to book ratio of 1500:1” |
| FX | “We will charge 2% on the exchange rate.” |
| Stays | “Profit share on every completed stay.” (contact sales) |
| Enterprise | “Bespoke pricing” |
“If you make 10 orders in a month, then you’ll be allowed 10 * 1500 = 15000 searches free of charge. If you made 25,000 searches, then you’d pay (25000 - 15000) * $0.005 = $50”
This is a well-designed model for a travel seller. Search is nearly free as long as you convert, and 1500:1 is a generous ratio.
Where it breaks
Read the allowance backwards
The free search budget is a function of your order count. No orders, no free searches.
If you place no orders, you get no free searches, and every search is $0.005. For a non-booking workload that is 2x our $25 tier ($0.0025 per search) and 5x our $50 tier ($0.0010). And that is before the practical problem, which is not price at all:
You have to be a travel seller to be a Duffel customer. Their sign-up copy is “Sign up and start selling flights in less than 1 minute.” If you are building a price-tracking dashboard, a fare-alert bot, a market-research tool, an AI travel assistant that hands off to Google Flights, or an internal travel-budget tool, you are not selling flights and you never will be. The model has no lane for you.
There is also a data-shape mismatch. Booking APIs return bookable offers: what is purchasable, right now, through the channels the platform has contracts with. That is the correct answer for a checkout flow and the wrong answer for “what does this route cost in the market,” which is what Google Flights shows and what most research, alerting and comparison products actually need.
FlightPowers list pricing, for the same searches
| 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.
Capabilities
What each one is actually for
Prose cells, not ticks, including the rows Duffel simply wins.
| Duffel | FlightPowers | |
|---|---|---|
| Selling a ticket | The whole point: order creation, ancillaries, seat selection, changes and cancellations, on bookable contracted inventory. What you quote is what you can sell. | Cannot sell anything. Every result carries a buy_link that hands the traveller to Google Flights to complete the purchase elsewhere. |
| Accreditation | Access to their 5 IATAs worldwide through Managed Content, with no accreditation of your own. That alone removes months of work. | Not applicable: no bookings, so no accreditation question ever arises. |
| Search pricing | Search rides along with orders: 1,500 free searches per confirmed order, then $0.005 per excess search. A high-volume seller that converts well may pay less with Duffel than with any per-search vendor. | Search is the product: flat monthly tiers from $10, down to $0.0010 per search on the top tier. Pricing → |
| Price context | Returns offers: the price you can transact at through their channels. | Returns the market: every result carries Google’s historical band (price_insights_low/high) and a low | typical | high verdict, so a fare-alert product knows whether $412 is a good price without accumulating its own history. Price insights → |
| Round-trip | A booking flow concern; their model is built around offers and orders. | A first-class data endpoint: POST /v1/flights/roundtrip returns both legs and a combined total in a single object, priced as a pair the way airlines actually price them. Round-trip → |
| Failed vs empty search | Not something we evaluated for a booking flow. | Every flights response reports X-Search-Status (ok | empty | partial | degraded), so “no flights” and “the search failed” are different answers; opt-in strict: true turns a degraded search into an HTTP 503. Search status → |
| Hotels | Duffel Stays is a booking product with profit-share pricing (“Profit share on every completed stay”), built for completing reservations. | A data product: live Booking.com rates with proxy_country: the same room priced as a visitor from different markets sees it, for rate-parity and geo-pricing monitoring. Geo-pricing → |
| AI agents | We did not evaluate Duffel’s agent tooling. | First-party hosted MCP servers: point an MCP-capable host at https://flights.flightpowers.com/mcp and flight search becomes a native tool. MCP setup → |
The decision
Which should you pick
Choose Duffel when
- The purchase happens inside your product: you are an OTA, a corporate booking tool, an agency, or a marketplace taking payment for travel.
- You need bookable, contracted inventory rather than a public-facing price.
- You want their IATA accreditation instead of acquiring your own.
- You convert well: the 1500:1 search allowance makes search effectively free for a seller.
- You need the post-booking lifecycle: changes, cancellations, order management.
Choose FlightPowers when
- You need to know prices without selling them: fare alerts, price dashboards, cheapest-date calendars.
- You are doing market or competitor research on live consumer fares.
- You are building an AI travel assistant that hands off to a booking site.
- You run affiliate or comparison products where the buy_link is the handoff.
- You need internal travel-cost tooling with Google’s own price verdict attached.
Use both if you are an OTA that also wants market context: Duffel for what you can sell, a data API for what the market is charging. They answer different questions and neither one degrades into the other.
Try it
Price a trip in one request
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"
}'Free tier: 10 requests/month, hard cap. It verifies your key, doesn’t evaluate. The full walkthrough is in How to get real-time Google Flights data.
Questions, answered plainly
- Can FlightPowers book a flight?
- No, and this page says so in its first paragraph. FlightPowers returns prices and a buy_link, a deep link that opens the exact itinerary on Google Flights, where the traveller completes the purchase somewhere else. If the transaction must happen inside your product, Duffel is the right kind of tool and we are not.
- Is Duffel more expensive than FlightPowers?
- For a travel seller, often not: Duffel’s search allowance (1500 free searches per confirmed order, per their pricing page retrieved 2026-08-24) means a well-converting seller pays little for search. For a non-booking workload the allowance is zero, every search is $0.005, and that is 2x our $25 tier and 5x our $50 tier on published list prices.
- Do the two APIs return the same kind of data?
- No. Booking APIs return bookable offers: what is purchasable right now through the platform’s contracted channels. FlightPowers returns what Google Flights shows: live consumer market pricing, with Google’s historical band and low | typical | high verdict attached. A checkout flow needs the first; research, alerting and comparison products usually need the second.
- Can I use Duffel and FlightPowers together?
- Yes, and it is a sensible split for an OTA that also wants market context: Duffel for what you can sell, a data API for what the market is charging. They answer different questions and neither degrades into the other.
- Where do the Duffel numbers on this page come from?
- From duffel.com/pricing, read on 2026-08-24 and quoted rather than paraphrased. If a number here disagrees with their site today, believe their site.
Telling people about travel, not selling it?
Live market prices with Google's band and verdict on every result: the answer a checkout API isn't built to give.
Free tier: 10 requests/month. No card to try.