from Hacker News

Ask HN: Google QPX Express API is done next week – anybody found a replacement?

by Gaussian on 4/5/18, 9:07 PM with 2 comments

I used QPX to build a popular feature on our ski travel site:

https://www.zrankings.com/powderfares

The ski season is drawing to a close, obviously, so we'll basically make it through this season with this intact. But I have yet to find another API that gives the same kind of queryable access to the flight database (ITA, owned by Google).

Is this simply a case where startups/small companies are now out of luck, full stop? Or does anybody know of a decent alternative that has cropped up?

Needless to say, this decision by Google, along with a few other data points, has soured my outlook on their status as the arbiter of so much of the world's useful data.

  • by ezekg on 4/5/18, 9:30 PM

    I've been using Kiwi's API [0] after I was blacklisted from QPX for a buggy rate-limit backoff implementation (before the news of the shutdown). Never got a response from QPX support, and I was a paying QPX customer. Kiwi is a lot nicer to work with anyways, and they offer deep URLs so that you can link to a booking page.

    [0]: https://docs.kiwi.com/