Flight deal services?

Also, does anyone know of a way I can search for a start and end point, and find other airports nearby to fly out of for much cheaper?

Skyscanner and Google Flights are both pretty flexible - they let you specify anything from the granularity of a single airport right up to a whole continent for your endpoints. Both also do a decent job of flagging where a price sits compared to the average, estimating for nearby dates and locations, alerting on deals, etc.

In my experience the deals available do sometimes vary between the two even for the exact same journey, and then obviously beyond that the broader matching is going to be done in a way that's proprietary to each service, so if I'm looking for cash fares I tend to search on both once I've got a rough idea of when/where I might be going.

If you've got 25 minutes to spare, this is also a great intro to the how and why underlying the way airline routing and ticketing works. Kind of a nerdy suggestion, I know, but I've found it super helpful to understand what the hell's actually driving all this when it comes to actually getting the practical results I want - and that's one of the best condensed overviews I've seen.

Depending how deep you want to go on this, there's also FlyerTalk, which is more targeted to extremely frequent business travellers, but has an absolute wealth of info on getting cheap or even free tickets with points that can be maximised from things like credit card introductory offers. It's definitely a niche forum with its own jargon and the rest, but these people have an incredible amount of real, on the ground (or not, as the case may be) knowledge about the industry and how to squeeze the most out of it.

All of that is to say that I've never used any of the paid services, so I can't help you there specifically, but I have been taking deeply discounted or free flights for quite a long time by churning credit cards and understanding how best to make use of the booking systems. That approach might not be for you at all - I find the industry generally fascinating, so I'd be interested in this stuff either way - but it's definitely worked for me!

We used the paid version of Scott's Cheap Flights about 18 months ago when searching for flights from the mainland US to Europe. I think there was a really good deal that came up within the first couple of weeks for the TAP airline. This has generally been the case whenever we paid the $40 or so dollars for the year of flight emails. There are loads of deals, some more useful than others depending on where you live.

If your travel window includes a range of destinations and somewhat broad timeframe, I think Scott's Cheap Flights is worth it (having used it in the past). You stand to save a lot more than the current $50 for even a single good flight deal. And, it's honestly nice to not have to be monitoring airline sites/price alerts constantly.

I subscribed to Scott's Cheap Flights back when they still offered the service outside of the US. And for the past half a year, I've been paying for Mighty Travels Premium.

I feel both have been well worth the price. You basically save the subscription price if you book just one trip a year through the deals. But for me, what's actually even more valuable is learning what destinations are available and repeatedly discounted, and what airlines I should keep an eye on. It's also nice to see those emails every day or two, read about the destinations and dream about going somewhere, even if I don't act on the offers.

In terms of the UI, Scott's Cheap Flights was (at least back in 2019) quite simple and straightforward, while Mighty Travels (today) has more granular settings that you can use to tweak the alerts. Yet, the offers Scott's found felt a little more human, or something.

Also, in the end, and for the airports that I'm close to, the discounts tend to be ok, rather than great. I remember seeing only one absolutely amazing deal, which was clearly a mispricing from the airline's part -- basically something like 150€ for a return flight from Europe to Shanghai. I was too slow to book it, as I was trying to get hold of my wife to ask when she'd be available to travel, and by the time I finally got to checkout and payment, the airline had realised their mistake.