FAQ

Is it good for my case?

Is an enthusiast-driven best-effort API good for you? It depends!

This API is built with the idea of supporting smaller applications teams, researchers, individual developers, and anyone else who can’t afford hefty charges imposed by market-leading data companies and who are OK with having less in terms of data precision, coverage, and service stability in exchange. Therefore, we keep all expenses as low as possible: sometimes it may affect the performance and stability of the service. All the data is delivered in the best effort fashion with no guarantees!

If you’re developing a small aviation or hospitality application or website which has not much load and has lesser data precision and quality demands, our API may be just right for you, because it:

  • is offered at symbolic rates (see Pricing);
  • has some unique features which are not offered anywhere else or offered at higher rates (airport and flight delays, airport destination statistics, take-off/landing runway detection, etc.);
  • means supporting smaller enthusiastic projects rather than bigger corporate products;
  • is not complicated in use.

However, you are strongly discouraged, and even not allowed in some cases, to use our API for mission-critical products expecting high loads, having critical demands for service stability, global coverage, data quality, and precision; especially if your product is involved with real-life aircraft operations or navigation! We cannot guarantee data completeness and uninterrupted service on the market-leading level at this time, and we definitely do not want to “oversell” ourselves. In this case, you are advised to contact other data providers or government data distributors. 

What is the stability of the service?

We are doing our best to achieve the best uptime possible. Our current uptime metrics can be seen here.

What are the data quality and coverage?

Though our coverage of aircraft data is rather decent, flight data coverage is somewhat limited. Please read more about data coverage.

Do you have worldwide coverage for flights? Which airports are supported?

Coverage is extensive, yet not worldwide. Please read more about data coverage.

Why charging at all?

Even a relatively small enthusiast-driven project, like AeroDataBox, processes gigabytes of data in a very complex manner daily. It requires constant attention from highly qualified professionals involved with the project and regular payments for server infrastructure. In a modest attempt to compensate for these expenses and volunteering, our aero data API is made public at a very low cost.

Please remember that software engineering and aviation enthusiasts working on AeroDataBox during their spare time in between job and family duties are not getting paid for these efforts. At the moment, incomes from API are not even close to speaking about hiring anyone of them even on minimum wage. For the same reason, we kindly ask for your understanding if some aspects of data quality are not meeting your expectations.

Do you have free trials?

In the past, we used to provide free access to our Basic plan, which is an excellent plan for trying the API. Unfortunately, this option was often abused by customers creating multiple accounts and continuing using our API this way for extended periods of time. Effective July 2023 we discontinued completely free access to AeroDataBox API and put a symbolic fee for the lowest of our plans.

Do you provide free or discounted API keys for students?

Yes, we do. But special terms apply.

You don’t have the feature I need. Is it possible to add it?

You are always welcome to send us your suggestion! We regularly make adjustments and introduce new features into our API based on the feedback received from the users. However, we cannot always guarantee that your feature will be implemented (soon): unfortunately, not all things are possible or achievable within a reasonable amount of time and effort. We have as well a long backlog of items to work on, and there might be more critical things awaiting there.

You may as well contact us if you don’t want to wait or if you’re looking for a custom solution to be implemented for you on a paid basis. Depending on our availability and your budget and requirements, we might be able to discuss possible options.