Going alternatives: 6 flight deal services compared

Going, formerly Scott’s Cheap Flights, is the best-known flight deal service in the US, and it is genuinely good at the thing it was designed to do. The reason people go looking for an alternative is almost never that it is bad. It is that its model has a shape, and plenty of travellers fall outside it.

This is a comparison of six options, including Going itself and including us. Prices quoted are as of July 2026 and move often, so check before you buy.

Why people look for something else

Four recurring reasons, in rough order of how often they come up.

The deals are not from your airport. Curated services work from a list of supported departure airports, weighted heavily toward major hubs. If you fly out of a mid-sized city, a large share of what lands in your inbox is unreachable without a positioning flight.

The deals are not to where you want to go. The model finds low fares and then tells you where they are. That is inspiration, which is valuable, and it is the opposite of what you need when you have to be in Munich in April.

The volume. A service whose value is finding many deals sends many emails. That is the product working correctly, and it is also why a lot of memberships go unread by month three.

The price, relative to how you travel. Going’s Elite tier is $199 a year, Thrifty Traveler Premium is $129.99, Dollar Flight Club Premium is $69. If you take one flexible leisure trip a year, the maths can work on a single booking. If you take four specific trips a year, it may never work at all.

Two different products wearing the same label

Before the table, the distinction that makes the whole category legible.

Curated deal lists employ people and software to find unusually low fares out of a set of airports, then send those finds to the whole membership. You are buying discovery. The service chooses the destinations.

Route watchers track something you specified and tell you when its price is worth your attention. You are buying coverage of your own plans. You choose the destinations.

Almost every complaint about a service in this category traces back to buying one when you needed the other. The full taxonomy, four kinds rather than two, is in the types of flight price alert.

The six, side by side

The services, honestly

Going. The category leader, and the free tier is unusually generous for one. Its strength is genuine editorial judgement: the fares it surfaces tend to be properly low rather than mildly discounted, and the write-ups tell you why. Its constraint is structural. You pick departure airports, not destinations, so its usefulness is a direct function of how flexible you are. Stay with Going if you can say “somewhere warm in March” and mean it. Look elsewhere if you cannot.

Thrifty Traveler. Similar shape to Going, with a heavier emphasis on award availability and points redemptions, and a smaller, more curated volume. If you hold transferable points and you want alerts that account for them, this is the one in the category actually built for that. It is also the most expensive of the three curated lists after its 2026 price increase, so the points angle needs to be worth something to you.

Dollar Flight Club. The cheapest way into the curated model at $69 a year. The trade is volume over precision: more alerts, with a wider spread of quality, and less editorial context around each one. If you are flexible and price-sensitive and you would rather filter yourself than pay for someone else to filter, it is a reasonable entry point.

Google Flights. Free, reliable, and better than most people give it credit for. The date grid and price graph are the fastest way to establish what a route normally costs, which is the foundation of every other judgement you make. Its tracking will tell you when a searched fare moves. It will also tell you when the fare moves upward, and the tracking is bolted to the dates you searched, so it goes stale when they pass. There is a fuller breakdown in how Flydar and Google Flights alerts differ.

Skyscanner and Kayak. Both free, both strong at broad exploratory search, both offering “everywhere” and flexible-month views that Google Flights handles less gracefully. Their alerting has the same per-search limitation. Use them for the search, not for the watching.

Flydar. We build the per-route watcher described above. You describe routes you would actually fly and a travel window rather than fixed dates, and the only email you get is when an economy fare has dropped clearly below what that route normally costs. Nothing on increases. Nothing when the dates roll past. The honest limitation is the mirror image of Going’s: we watch what you name, so if what you wanted was somebody to tell you where to go this winter, a curated list does that and we do not.

Picking, in four questions

Can you name the destination? If no, you want a curated list. Route watchers have nothing to watch until you name something.

Do you fly from a major hub? If no, curated lists lose most of their value, and the gap does not close by paying for a higher tier.

Is this one trip, or an ongoing habit? For one trip on known dates, use free per-search tracking and stop reading here. Ongoing coverage of several routes is where a paid watcher starts making sense.

Do you have points to spend? If yes and it matters to you, Thrifty Traveler is the one in this list built around that.

The combination most people should actually run

Free per-search tracking for the trip you have already committed to, because it is free and precise and the noise problem barely bites over a few weeks.

Then one paid service for the trips you would otherwise never check, chosen by the first question above: a curated list if you are flexible about destination, a route watcher if you are not.

That covers both jobs for the price of one subscription, and it is a more useful answer than any single service in this list, including ours.