Several major and exciting things went live during the last month, and they’re all connected.
- This website got completely reworked, with flight search and airport departure and arrival boards pages made available to everyone, powered by our API, so you can browse our data before committing to any subscriptions or simply check on your flight.
- You can now subscribe to AeroDataBox directly, with no marketplace in the middle. This sets an important milestone, as marketplaces set the boundaries of what we could build or manage, and having our own platform removes that ceiling, so expect more features and more flexible ones from here on.
- You can join our ADS-B network, feed us data from your own receiver and get API credits for the data fed into our network to cover your API use.
Direct API access without marketplaces
Same API, same endpoints, same data contracts. What changes is the route: our own gateway, our own portal, no middlemen. Payments will be faciliated through a merchant of record and we will be able to directly assist with the billing-related issues. If only we had a penny every time someone asks us about billing and we can do nothing but proxying them to the RapidAPI support!
We introduced a set of entirely new pricing plans. Plans are monthly, you cancel whenever you like, and your key, your quota and your invoices all sit in one dashboard.
For additional security, you direct API keys may also be pinned to specific IP addresses or CIDR ranges reducing risks associated with the key leakage.
Pricing plans
Thanks to the reduced commission fees (comparing to the marketplaces), direct plans allows us to provide overall better ratio between API units and prices
Starter, currently at $19/month, gets you 40,000 API units at 5 requests per second. It’s the smallest direct plan, and the natural landing spot if you’re moving from a marketplace.
Growth, currently at $99/month, is 400,000 units at 10 req/s (overages coming soon). It also unlocks extended caching, so you can hold on to our data for as long as you’re subscribed rather than working around a seven-day window.
Scale, currently at $499/month, is 4,000,000 units at 20 req/s (overages coming soon). It carries the most permissive terms we offer anywhere: Commercial derived work sublicensing for B2B cases, so you can pass commercial rights on to business customers, and caching that outlives the subscription itself. Cancel, and you keep the cached data for as long as you were subscribed, up to a year. More rights and services are coming to this plan too.
The full side-by-side is on the pricing page including all the perks.
Moving over from a marketplace
Don’t worry: there is no plan to discontinue services through RapidAPI or API.Market. If you are happy with your current plan at your marketplace you are free to stay there.
But if you choose to migrate to direct subscriptions, your code will barely changes. Endpoints, parameters and response contracts are identical across marketplaces and our direct gateway, so nothing about how you interact with the API is different. What differs is the gateway URL you call and the way your key is passed, and both are laid out in the direct spec and sandbox on the API specification page.
In practice: create an account here, subscribe to a direct plan or use API credits (more on this below), point your client at the direct gateway from the OpenAPI spec with your new key from your account dashboard, and run your code. Nothing forces you to rush, so keep the marketplace subscription alive until you’re happy, then cancel it on the marketplace side.
Feed your ADS-B data and earn API credits
Join our network! Part of our coverage comes from a community of ADS-B receivers, and you can now easily join it.
An ADS-B receiver is a small box that listens for the signals aircraft broadcast overhead: a Raspberry Pi, a USB radio dongle, and an antenna somewhere with a clear view of the sky. The hardware is cheap, the software is free, and no aviation background is required. If you already feed one of the big aggregators, like FlightRadar24, ADSBExchange or FlightAware, pointing your setup at us as well will be easy, and your existing feeds keep working.
Every receiver sharpens the picture, particularly outside the well-covered parts of the world where a single feeder can make a visible difference. The contribute guide covers how to set up your receiver, how to start feeding data to us and how to claim your receiver once it’s running to get API credits (more on this further).
Getting API credits back
Every position your receiver reports counts toward a balance you can convert into API credits, and API credits behave differently from your paid subscription monthly units:
- They don’t expire. Earned once, yours until you spend them. They do not reset on every billing cycle unlike regular API units.
- They work with or without a subscription. On a plan, they kick in automatically once your monthly units run out. Off a plan, they’re all you need to keep calling. So a receiver on your windowsill can act as a buffer when a busy month overshoots your quota, or carry your API usage entirely on its own. A hobby project that pays for itself, and better coverage for everyone out the other end.
Credits live with your account here. You don’t need a paid plan to earn them or spend them. But keep in mind: they don’t work on RapidAPI or API.Market subscriptions, you need an account with us to utilize them.
Getting started
For a paid plan, go to the pricing page and choose “Directly with Us” from the boxes at the top; the direct plans appear underneath.
You don’t have to buy anything to get started, though. Hit “Sign In” at the top right of the website and create an account: you get the portal, an API key and somewhere to claim a receiver, with no plan attached. If you already had an account on our old web-site (webshop), use that one, it still works.
We also significantly expanded FAQ to exaplain more details of the new and existing billling and coverage, as well as expanded our terms of use and privacy policy to accomodate these changes. Some of these changes are summarized in the previous post.