What does flight-mcp.com actually bill for?

Cache misses. Their published plans are a free tier of 300 monthly cache misses, Lite at $19 for 10,000 and Pro at $49 for 30,000, and their page states that cached responses do not consume plan calls. So the meter runs on how novel your queries are rather than on how many you make. Figures read from flight-mcp.com on 2026-09-05.

When does cache-based pricing beat per-call pricing?

When many callers ask the same question. A public route page, a popular city pair, a chatbot that everyone asks about the same three destinations: those repeat, so most requests are hits and cost nothing. A tracker sweeping 300 unique date pairs a day repeats almost nothing, so nearly every request is a miss and the pricing behaves like per-call pricing with a smaller allowance.

Does a cached fare matter for alerting?

It is the thing to check before you build. A fare alert is only as good as the freshness of the number behind it, so if you are going to wake someone up over a price you need to know how old that price is allowed to be. Their page is where that answer lives; read their cache policy directly rather than trusting a summary of it here. Every one of our calls is scanned live against Google Flights at request time, which is why our prices cost what they cost.

Yes, and both are in the official MCP registry. Theirs was published there on 2026-08-25 and ships REST alongside it. We publish a paid bring-your-own-key MCP server, a free ad-supported one, and the same data as a plain REST API. That row is close to a tie.

Comparison · competitor data retrieved 2026-09-05

FlightPowers vs flight-mcp.com

flight-mcp.com prices the cache rather than the call: their published plans meter cache misses and their page says cached responses do not consume plan calls. It is a genuinely different pricing idea, and whether it saves you money depends entirely on how much your queries repeat.

The one-paragraph version

Repetition is the whole variable

Their meter counts the questions nobody has asked recently. If your traffic asks the same handful of questions over and over, most of it is free and that is hard to beat. If your traffic is a sweep, unique date pairs across a range, a comp set, a monitor that by definition wants a number nobody has fetched yet, then almost everything is a miss and their allowance is the real quota. Work out your own hit rate before you compare any price, because without it neither plan means anything.

Pricing

Both sides, from the published pages

flight-mcp.com figures read from their own site on the stamped date. Ours render from the same file as /pricing, parsed from the live listing.

flight-mcp.com

Free: 300 cache misses per month.
Lite: $19 per month for 10,000 cache misses.
Pro: $49 per month for 30,000 cache misses.
Cached responses are free and do not consume plan calls.
Normalized flight offers over REST and MCP, with bringing your own upstream key supported.
Published to the official MCP registry on 2026-08-25.

Source: flight-mcp.com, read 2026-09-05. Their cache policy, including how long a response stays a hit, is on their site and is the number that decides everything below. If their page disagrees with this one today, believe their page.

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

Swipe the table sideways for overage and rate limits.

Every plan on this API includes all of its endpoints; flights and hotels are separate subscriptions. Read from the live listing on 2026-09-11; the listing is authoritative.

Every request is metered, hit or miss, because there are no hits: each one is scanned live against Google Flights at request time. Per thousand requests, PRO is $4.00 and ULTRA is $2.50.

Capabilities

Feature by feature, in prose

No tick marks. Each cell says what is documented, and by whom.

	flight-mcp.com	FlightPowers
What is billed	Cache misses. Cached responses are free and do not consume plan calls. Free 300 a month, Lite $19 for 10,000, Pro $49 for 30,000.	Requests. Every call is a live scan, so there is no cheaper class of call to route into.
Freshness	Depends on their cache policy, which is published on their site. Read it against your own alerting tolerance.	Live at request time, nothing served from a cache, which is the reason the price you get is the price the traveller sees. Price Insights →
Bring your own upstream key	Supported, per their page.	Not on the REST API. Our paid MCP server is bring-your-own-key by design, which is the same idea in the agent lane. MCP servers →
Scope	Flights, normalized offers over REST and MCP.	Flights and Booking.com hotels on one key, including per-market pricing. Geo-pricing →

flight-mcp.com cells quote or summarise their own live pages and registry entry, read 2026-09-05; FlightPowers cells are traceable to the live listing and the pages linked from each row.

The decision

Which should you pick

Choose flight-mcp.com when

Your queries repeat heavily, so most of your traffic is cache hits and costs nothing.
You are serving a public surface where many users ask the same route.
You want to bring your own upstream key on the REST side.
A response that is minutes old is fine for what you are showing.

Choose FlightPowers when

You are alerting on prices and a stale fare is worse than no fare.
Your workload is a sweep of unique date pairs, where a cache gives you nothing.
You want Google's price band and verdict on every result rather than a normalized offer alone.
You want hotels on the same key.

Questions, answered plainly

What does flight-mcp.com actually bill for?: Cache misses. Their published plans are a free tier of 300 monthly cache misses, Lite at $19 for 10,000 and Pro at $49 for 30,000, and their page states that cached responses do not consume plan calls. So the meter runs on how novel your queries are rather than on how many you make. Figures read from flight-mcp.com on 2026-09-05.
When does cache-based pricing beat per-call pricing?: When many callers ask the same question. A public route page, a popular city pair, a chatbot that everyone asks about the same three destinations: those repeat, so most requests are hits and cost nothing. A tracker sweeping 300 unique date pairs a day repeats almost nothing, so nearly every request is a miss and the pricing behaves like per-call pricing with a smaller allowance.
Does a cached fare matter for alerting?: It is the thing to check before you build. A fare alert is only as good as the freshness of the number behind it, so if you are going to wake someone up over a price you need to know how old that price is allowed to be. Their page is where that answer lives; read their cache policy directly rather than trusting a summary of it here. Every one of our calls is scanned live against Google Flights at request time, which is why our prices cost what they cost.
Do both offer MCP?: Yes, and both are in the official MCP registry. Theirs was published there on 2026-08-25 and ships REST alongside it. We publish a paid bring-your-own-key MCP server, a free ad-supported one, and the same data as a plain REST API. That row is close to a tie.

Keep comparing

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Bigger free tier, dearer entry plan

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Platform vs specialist

Our MCP servers

Paid BYO key, and a free one

Build a price alert

Where freshness stops being academic

A key is on the RapidAPI listing, free plan included, if you would rather test than read.

No cache to explain to your users

Every call is scanned live against Google Flights at request time, with Google's own price band on every result.

Get a key on RapidAPI →See pricing

Free tier: 10 requests/month. No card to try.