My bill was $1200+ and I’d really like to learn why. My application was fetching about 30 flights 4 times per hour for a weekend. I understand the cost to be .005 cents per ‘result set’. What is a result set? I am assuming it is a flight call that I am requesting info about.? or is it each piece of data that comes back for a flight such as the airport code, est, sch and act times, etc…?
You can use AeroAPI Developer Portal - FlightAware to review and monitor your usage. If you view the “previous month” you can see that your usage that month was primarily from the 238k calls to GET /flights/{ident} made between Sept 8 and Sept 18, with at least 18k per day in that period. This might be indicative of your application running both longer and more frequently than you were expecting.
In general, the “result set” refers to a “page” of 15 objects. For the case of GET /flights/{ident}, that means 15 flights by that ident. By default, that endpoint assumes it should return only 1 page (ie: at most 15 flights) unless you specify a higher value to the max_pages argument.
@bovineone , Thank for your reply… yes that bill was for longer than a weekend, My app just kept running after the intended weekend it was supposed to run. But even so… the first spike of 44K calls in one day… 30 flights times 4x hr x 24hr is barely 3000 calls, not 44 thousand. that’s like 30 calls per minute. reality was more like 30 calls every 15 min and it went down as flights arrived and were not being requested any longer. Just trying to grasp what happened…
I even used a time frame to ensure under 1 page was returned.
I suppose I don’t know enough about the terminology in order to ask the right question here.
Can you kindly address the following:
Is 1 call = 1 flight# request? Is all of the contents of the flight call that gets returned considered a result or is each field (airport code, schedule arrival time, est, actual times, etc.) considered considered when calculating the result? ie: if i submit a request for a single flight# with /flights/{ident} and only do it one time, is everything it gives me considered the 1 result set (.005) or does each item/piece of info it gives back cost .005?
@bovineone hi there… are you able to address my issue further? As a test today I submitted one and only one flight/ident request using your documentation test page and then I also submitted one and only one with postman. Waited a bit to see hat would show up under my API Usage and low and behold there are 7 calls. How did 2 turn into 7? Again, my questions above are valid, hope to hear from you soon… thanks for clarifying…
We are looking into it. Could you confirm what you requested on the website and in postman?
https://aeroapi.flightaware.com/aeroapi/flights/JAL12?start=2022-10-25&end=2022-10-26
I did this again with my 2nd api key i have later on in the day and did receive only 1 call as expected.
I am guessing that even if the call does not go through ie: I received an invalid api response 401 several times before it finally worked, that I am still charged?
Looking into the usage, it appears there were requests, at times, every second for the same flight. I would recommend taking another look into your code to ensure there is not something that would cause runaway processes, but it does not appear that we were simply counting pages wrong or otherwise that would have had an effect on the price charged.
I do not believe that fails are billed.
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:01} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:02} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:03} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:04} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:06} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:08} raw_uri /j…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:11} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:13} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:14} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:16} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:17} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
end_time {2022-09-08 07:00:19} raw_uri /json/…?start=1662678900&end=1662686100&howMany=15&offset=0&ident=UA2076&include_ex_data=1…
Thanks but looks like you are looking at Sept 8th… The test I would like analyzed just took place on 10/25 where I very methodically attempted to figure out what is being charged. And i STILL would like a simple answer to my questions: you’re dealing with a novice, so I apologize for not using/knowing the correct terminology. Thanks!
Is 1 call = 1 flight# request? Is all of the contents of the flight call that gets returned considered a result or is each field (airport code, schedule arrival time, est, actual times, etc.) considered when calculating the result? ie: if i submit a request for a single flight# with /flights/{ident} and only do it one time, is everything it gives me considered the 1 result set (.005) or does each item/piece of info it gives back cost .005?
If you are looking up a single ident, you can get returned up to 15 responses (15 responses = 1 page) for it to count as 1 call
No, the result is the flight. All of the data points within the flight are not a response/result
All of the data encompassed within that call is a single result set. If that result set is the only result, that would be a page. If there were up to 15 results for that single call, that would also be a page) either way, it would be charged as 1 page.