Google Flights MCP: real-time fares your agent can search across a whole date range, ad-free

One URL, either way in:

claude mcp add --transport http google-flights https://flights.flightpowers.com/mcp

In a client that supports MCP authorization, a Sign in button appears: you sign in with Google, and your first 10 searches each day are free and ad-free on our key, with nothing to paste. Paste your own RapidAPI key once on the /connect page when you want that cap gone, and nothing goes in your client config either way. In a client that shows no Sign in button, bring the key yourself:

claude mcp add --transport http google-flights https://flights.flightpowers.com/mcp --header "x-rapidapi-key: YOUR_RAPIDAPI_KEY"

Same URL, both times. A request carrying a credential of any kind is served; a request carrying nothing at all is answered 401 with the OAuth metadata, which is what makes the Sign in button appear. https://flights.flightpowers.com/mcp/oauth is still live and demands the sign-in on the first request, for clients whose auth mode is fixed when a server is added.

Hosted. Nothing to clone, nothing to build. Listed in the official MCP Registry as com.flightpowers/google-flights-mcp. Health check: /health.

No key yet? You do not need one to start. Add the URL above, sign in with Google, and the first 10 searches each UTC day run on our key, ad-free, with nothing to paste. The exact unit counted is in Try it with no key.

Need a key? Subscribe to the Google Flights Live API on RapidAPI, free tier available, and copy your x-rapidapi-key: https://rapidapi.com/mtnrabi/api/google-flights-live-api

Want more free searches than that, and do not mind ads? There is a separate free, ad-supported server: claude mcp add --transport http google-flights-free https://free-trial.flightpowers.com/mcp (50 searches a day and 250 a month per signed-in account, one disclosed sponsored card per result, fan-out capped at 15, and clients that cannot render the sponsored card may be capped further.) Come back here when the ads, the 15-search cap, or those client restrictions get in your way.

What your agent gets

Two tools that answer a fare question, not a date lookup.

• Ask open-ended questions. "Cheapest one-way to Sri Lanka anywhere in October", "5 to 7 nights in Rome sometime in May, from Tel Aviv or Larnaca": each is one tool call. Both tools take a departure date range, a list of destination airports, and (round-trip) a nights value instead of a fixed return date, and expand them internally.
• Say whether a price is actually good. Every result carries Google's own historical range for that route and period: price_insights_low, price_insights_high, and a price_range_in_relation_to_other_periods verdict of low / typical / high. That is what lets an agent answer "$209 is typical here, don't rush" instead of just quoting a number.
• Book, not just browse. Every result includes a buy_link to Google Flights.
• Know what it spent. Every response carries api_usage: requests used by this call, and what is left on the caller's plan. See Spend reporting.
• Know what it searched. Every response carries search_coverage, so the model can say honestly which dates and destinations the answer is based on.

Results are live fares. They go stale within minutes: never cache a fare or reuse an earlier result; search again and state when the data was fetched.

Try it with no key: sign in with Google

A signed-in account gets 10 free searches per UTC day on our key, ad-free, with nothing to paste into your client. Sign in the way your client offers it, or at https://flights.flightpowers.com/connect, and ask for a fare. Ten is what the hosted deployment runs today; /health reports the live values as trial_enabled and trial_day_cap and is the number to trust. (The allowance is off by default in this code and needs both PAID_TRIAL_DAY_CAP and PAID_TRIAL_RAPIDAPI_KEY set on purpose, so a deployment you run yourself has none until you configure one.)

A search is one date x destination combination, so one call with a three-day range spends three. The allowance is held for the whole plan before the first request goes out and whatever the fan-out did not send is given straight back, so two calls at once cannot both spend it. Every result carries a trial block with the count and the cap. Past the cap the tools answer with search_status: "trial_exhausted" and no results -- never an error, and retrying does not help; the allowance renews at 00:00 UTC.

Comparing several sources in one call (compare_hotel_rates, or search_hotels with more than one providers entry) is not part of the allowance and asks for your own key.

Connecting your own RapidAPI key removes the cap entirely. That is the next section.

Get a key (free tier available)

The server holds no upstream credential of its own. Every search beyond the free allowance is billed to your RapidAPI subscription, which is why the key travels with the request.

1. Subscribe to the Google Flights Live API: https://rapidapi.com/mtnrabi/api/google-flights-live-api
2. Copy your x-rapidapi-key.
3. Pass it to the server in any one of the three ways below.

If a key is missing and the allowance is not available to you, the tools do not fail silently and do not spend anything. They return needs_api_key: true with the signup URL and these instructions, phrased for the model to read back to you.

Three ways to pass your key

First non-empty source wins, in that order. The key is never logged, never echoed into an error message, and never returned in a tool response.

A fourth way: sign in once at /connect

This is the page the sign-in URL at the top of this README sends you to. A client that speaks MCP authorization walks you through it on its own; the steps below are the same thing done by hand.

Where a deployment has it enabled (check connect_enabled on /health), there is a page at /connect that replaces all of the above with a sign-in:

1. Open https://google-flights-mcp.flightpowers.com/connect (hotels: https://hotels.flightpowers.com/connect) and sign in with Google.
2. Paste your RapidAPI key once, into a form, over TLS.
3. Press Reveal the URL and copy the connect URL, …/mcp?fp_token=fpk_…, and use that as the server URL in your MCP client. Clients that let you set headers can send the same token as Authorization: Bearer fpk_… instead. (It is hidden until you ask for it: that URL is a 90-day bearer credential for your plan, and a page that prints one by default puts it in every screenshot and screen share.)

If your client signed you in itself -- Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT and anything else that speaks MCP authorization -- there is no URL to copy. /connect says so: it shows the key you connected and tells you to go back to your assistant. There is a link on it for the case where a second client cannot sign in and does need a connect URL.

What that buys you: your RapidAPI key is not in your client config, not in a URL, and not in whatever logs that URL passes through. What it costs: the server stores your key, encrypted, and knows your Google account id and email address. Disconnect on the same page deletes the record and kills every connect token for your account, immediately. The full description is section 2a of the privacy policy.

Some details worth knowing:

• Saving runs one check. The key is validated against the listing before it is stored, so a typo fails on the page rather than in your client an hour later. That check costs at most one request from your own plan: on the free BASIC plan (10 a month), one of ten. A key that RapidAPI rejects at the gateway costs nothing.
• A key on the request always wins. If you send an x-rapidapi-key header (or any of the other channels above) and carry a connect token, the request's own key is used. Nothing you already have set up changes behaviour because you signed in.
• The token is not your key and cannot be turned back into it. It is valid for 90 days, and it stops resolving the moment you disconnect. A call carrying a token whose key has been disconnected gets a needs_api_key reply telling you to reconnect. It never falls back to somebody else's subscription and never spends anything.
• BASIC is free. Google Flights Live API · Booking Live API. One RapidAPI key covers whichever of the two you have subscribed to; you connect it once.

Running /connect on your own deployment

Off unless all four of these are set. A half-configured deployment registers none of the routes and serves keyed callers exactly as before; /health reports connect_enabled so that is visible rather than guessed.