How do you calculate Alerts API billing?

1) Evaluation Plan

The Evaluation plan is a free plan intended for developers who are evaluating the Flex APIs and is available only for new accounts. You are allowed to create up to 500 free flight alerts on the Evaluation Plan. Deleting your test flight alerts will not reset the counter. Customers are expected to upgrade to the Contract Plan before launching their product using the Alerts API, or when they have exceeded the Evaluation allowance.

2) Contract Plan

A single flight rule may send out dozens of alerts (example: a significantly delayed flight may send out many more flight alerts than a routine flight that departs on time).

- A ruleId is considered billable once it has processed an event, regardless of whether that event resulted in a sent alert. The first event typically occurs 3 days before scheduled departure, barring extreme circumstances like impending hurricanes where cancellations may occur several days in advance. Any rule deleted before this time would not be charged.

- We do not charge you extra if you receive many callbacks on the same flight rule.

- The number of billable Flight rules is displayed on your invoice as the number of "Flight Rules on Day After".

Flight rules can be created many months in advance. It is common for travellers in the United States to fly to visit relatives for the Thanksgiving holiday in November. Since this is a busy travel weekend, users book their travel months in advance and may add a flight alert early. If they tried to buy their ticket in November, the available flights may be sold out so they make alternate plans and do not add a flight alert. So you may see very few flight alerts created in November for travel in November. But you may be billed for a high number of flight alerts in November where the flight alerts were created months earlier. We do not bill you at the time the flight alerts are added. Furthermore, if users cancel their travel plans and delete the flight alert before our system sends any flight event to the ruleId, you are not charged. You are only billed once for a ruleId that our system monitored for you, even if you receive many callbacks.

Note: We also offer a multi-flight endpoint for the Alerts API. This allows you monitor more than one flight (potentially hundreds) with a single ruleId. The billing for this is based on your use case. Please contact our specialists to discuss your requirements:

https://www.cirium.com/about/contact-us/