FlightAware's AeroAPI is one of the best-known flight data APIs, and its pricing page is unusually transparent: every endpoint has a published price. What the page doesn't do is tell you what your application will cost each month. That depends on which endpoints you call, how many records each call returns, how often you poll, and which licence tier you need.
This guide turns the published rates into monthly numbers. It explains how AeroAPI bills, what each tier includes, and works through four common builds. Prices are from FlightAware's AeroAPI page as of October 2026, and FlightAware notes they may change, so check before you commit.
We sell a competing API, so we've compared each example against SkyLink's flat plans. We've also been explicit about where AeroAPI is the cheaper or better choice, because in some cases it is.
The three tiers
AeroAPI has three tiers. They differ in the monthly minimum, rate limits, features and, most importantly, what you're licensed to do with the data.
| Personal | Standard | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly minimum | None | $100 | $1,000 |
| Free usage | Up to $5/month ($10 for ADS-B feeders) | — | — |
| Rate limit | 10 result sets/minute | 5 result sets/second | 100 result sets/second |
| Historical data | No | Yes | Yes |
| Alerts | No | Yes | Yes |
| Foresight predictions | No | No | Yes |
| Aireon space-based ADS-B | No | No | Yes |
| Uptime guarantee | None | None | 99.5% |
| Support | None | Email and phone | |
| Licence | Personal or academic use only | Internal business and B2C | All commercial use, including B2B |
The monthly minimum isn't an extra fee. On Standard, you pay the greater of your usage or $100. If your usage comes to $40, you pay $100. If it comes to $340, you pay $340.
The licence column matters most
The row people skip is the one that decides your tier.
- Personal is for personal or academic use. You can't use it for a business at all, even internally.
- Standard covers internal business use and business-to-consumer (B2C) products: a consumer travel app, for example.
- Premium is required for business-to-business (B2B) commercial use.
If you're building software that you sell to other businesses, such as a SaaS tool for travel agencies, FBOs or logistics companies, Standard doesn't cover it. You need Premium, which means a $1,000 monthly minimum before you've made a single call. That one detail changes the cost of a B2B product more than any per-query price.
For comparison, all of SkyLink's paid plans include a commercial licence to use the data inside your own products, whether your customers are consumers or businesses. Reselling the raw data as a competing feed needs a separate agreement with either provider.
How a query is billed
AeroAPI charges per result set, and a result set is up to 15 records. A call that returns 15 flights or fewer is billed once. A call that returns 40 flights is three result sets, billed three times.
That's why the same endpoint can cost very different amounts depending on the airport or search you point it at. A departure list for a small regional airport might be one result set, while a busy hub's might be six. The max_pages parameter caps how many result sets a call can return, and it's the main tool for keeping costs predictable.
Some representative per-result-set prices:
| Endpoint | Price | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
/flights/{ident} | $0.005 | Status of one flight number |
/airports/{id}/flights/scheduled_departures | $0.005 | Departure board |
/airports/{id}/flights | $0.020 | All flights at an airport |
/flights/search | $0.050 | Search by area, route or criteria |
/flights/{id}/track | $0.012 | Track of a current flight |
/history/flights/{ident} | $0.020 | Past flights for a flight number |
/history/flights/{id}/track | $0.060 | Track of a past flight |
/foresight/flights/{ident} | $0.015 | Predictive ETA (Premium) |
| Push alert delivery | $0.020 | Each alert sent to your server |
Airport weather observations and forecasts cost $0.002 each, and account and alert management calls are free.
Volume discounts
On Standard and Premium, the first $1,000 of monthly usage is billed at list price. Above that, each band is discounted:
| Monthly usage | Discount on that band |
|---|---|
| $0 – $1,000 | None |
| $1,000 – $2,000 | 30% |
| $2,000 – $4,000 | 51% |
| $4,000 – $8,000 | 65% |
| $8,000 – $16,000 | 76% |
| $16,000 – $32,000 | 83% |
| $32,000 – $64,000 | 88% |
| Above $64,000 | 94% |
The discounts are steep at high volume, so AeroAPI gets much cheaper per query for very large customers. Below $1,000 a month, which is where most startups and side projects live, you pay list price. FlightAware also offers further discounts for three- or four-year commitments.
Four worked examples
Each example uses list prices and realistic polling. SkyLink figures use the direct plans: Basic is $19 for 5,000 requests, Pro is $59 for 20,000, and extra requests on Pro cost $0.001 each. One SkyLink request is billed once however many records it returns.
1. Flight status for a consumer travel app
Users add their trips and the app shows live status. A flight is polled every five minutes from check-in to landing, which is about 100 calls for a long-haul trip. The app tracks 1,000 trips a month.
- AeroAPI, polling: 100,000 calls × $0.005 = $500/month on Standard.
- AeroAPI, using alerts instead: one lookup plus about five alerts per trip (delay, gate change, departure, arrival, landing) = 1,000 × ($0.005 + 5 × $0.02) = $105/month, so just above the $100 minimum.
- SkyLink, polling: 100,000 requests on Pro = $59 + 80,000 × $0.001 = $139/month.
This is a case where AeroAPI is competitive, provided you use its alerts. If your product is mostly "tell me when something changes", AeroAPI's push alerts are cheaper than polling anyone's API. SkyLink's Pro plan includes one active webhook, so at this scale you'd poll. If you can only poll, SkyLink comes out well ahead.
2. A departure board for one busy airport
A display shows the next 12 hours of departures, about 90 flights, refreshed every two minutes for 18 hours a day.
- AeroAPI: 90 flights is six result sets, so each refresh costs 6 × $0.005 = $0.03. That's 16,200 refreshes a month, or $486/month. Add arrivals and it's $972/month.
- SkyLink: the schedules endpoint returns the whole board in one request, so 16,200 requests is $59/month on Pro. With arrivals, 32,400 requests come to $71.40/month.
Per-record billing is what makes boards expensive on AeroAPI. A busy airport costs six times as much per refresh as a quiet one, and a 30-second refresh would quadruple the bill. Flat per-request pricing doesn't change with the size of the airport.
3. A live map of aircraft in a region
A map shows about 300 aircraft in a region, refreshed every 30 seconds for eight hours a day. The server polls once and shares the result with every viewer.
- AeroAPI: a 300-aircraft area search is 20 result sets at $0.05, so $1.00 per refresh. Over 28,800 refreshes a month that's $28,800 at list, or about $8,180 after volume discounts.
- SkyLink: the ADS-B endpoint returns every aircraft in a bounding box in one request, so 28,800 requests come to $67.80/month.
To be fair to FlightAware, AeroAPI isn't designed for live maps; FlightAware sells a separate streaming product, Firehose, for that. But developers do try AeroAPI's search endpoints for maps, and this is what it costs.
4. Replaying past flights
An analytics feature lets users look up a past flight by number and replay its track. Users do this 1,000 times a month.
- AeroAPI: one history lookup ($0.02) plus one historical track ($0.06) is $0.08 per replay, so $80 of usage. That's below Standard's minimum, so you pay $100/month.
- SkyLink: historical ADS-B is on Pro, and a replay is two requests, a search and a track. 2,000 requests fit within Pro's 20,000, so this costs $59/month, with the other 18,000 requests left for the rest of your app.
Summary
| Build | AeroAPI (Standard) | SkyLink (direct) |
|---|---|---|
| Status app, polling | $500 | $139 |
| Status app, alerts | $105 | $139 (polling) |
| Departure board, one airport | $486 | $59 |
| Departures + arrivals board | $972 | $71.40 |
| Live regional map | ~$8,180 | $67.80 |
| 1,000 historical replays | $100 | $59 |
If any of these is a B2B product, AeroAPI's Premium tier applies, and every AeroAPI figure below $1,000 becomes $1,000.
When AeroAPI is the better choice
AeroAPI is a strong product, and for some teams it's worth the price:
- Data you can't get elsewhere. FlightAware Foresight's predictive ETAs and Aireon space-based ADS-B, which covers oceanic and remote regions beyond ground receivers, are Premium features you can't easily replace.
- Alert-driven products at low volume. As example 1 shows, push alerts can make a status product cheap.
- Large enterprises. At tens of thousands of dollars a month, the volume discounts are substantial, and Premium includes a 99.5% uptime guarantee and phone support.
- Existing FlightAware users. If your operations team already relies on FlightAware data, matching it in your product avoids disagreements between sources. Why flight data disagrees explains why different providers show different positions.
When flat pricing wins
Per-query pricing gets expensive when your application:
- polls often, such as boards, maps and dashboards that refresh every minute or two
- reads lists, where large result sets multiply the cost per call
- is B2B, which on AeroAPI means Premium's $1,000 minimum
- needs more than flight data, such as decoded METAR and TAF weather, NOTAMs, airport databases or aerodrome charts, which AeroAPI either doesn't offer or offers only partly
SkyLink's plans are flat: a request costs the same whatever it returns, and every plan includes every endpoint. Foresight-style ETAs vs ML block-time models covers the prediction side of the comparison in more depth.
Estimating your own costs
Before choosing either provider, estimate your monthly volume:
- List your calls. Which endpoints, and how many times per user action or per minute?
- Count records, not calls. For AeroAPI, divide the typical number of records by 15 and round up. Use
max_pagesto cap it. - Multiply by refresh rate and hours. A two-minute refresh for 18 hours a day is 16,200 calls a month.
- Pick the tier your licence needs, then apply its minimum.
- Check whether alerts or webhooks can replace polling. That's often the biggest saving on either platform.
For SkyLink, step 2 doesn't apply: a request is a request. Basic's 5,000 requests cost $19, Pro's 20,000 cost $59, and yearly billing brings those to $16 and $49 a month. Above about 10,700 requests a month, Pro is cheaper than Basic plus overage.
Getting started
To compare the two on your own workload, the FlightAware vs SkyLink comparison sets out the feature differences, and the pricing page has SkyLink's plans. You can apply for the free trial to test with personal projects, or start on Basic and get a key immediately after checkout.