AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API

https://developer.accuweather.com/new-portal

268 263 12 months ago

developer.accuweather.com

otterley2• 12 months ago

NWS's APIs are still free of charge: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

macintux2• 12 months ago

For now. There's a pretty decent chance that AccuWeather is discontinuing this in anticipation that the NWS is going to be sabotaged.

Update: https://gizmodo.com/republicans-project-2025-would-end-free-...

exe344• 12 months ago

“These form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” Project 2025 says. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”

Shoot the messenger and bury your head in the sand!

imglorp2• 12 months ago

If the sabotage proceeds, effects will be felt by nautical, aviation, agriculture, commerce, water management, hydroelectric, and on and on. Weather is critical infrastructure for everything like roads and power. It can't be replaced by privatization.

It's another attack from within.

sbstp• 12 months ago

Project 2025 strongly opposes everything good in this world.

cess113• 12 months ago

That will surely make US agriculture great again.

throw0101b3• 12 months ago

https://gizmodo.com/republicans-project-2025-would-end-free-...

John Oliver did an episode on this during Trump 1.0:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8

* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11110660/

* s06e26: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Last_Week_Tonight_with...

* https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/dhmo0c/weather_...

_heimdall9• 12 months ago

This is one I don't really understand why the change would be a huge deal in context, the framing of an article as republicans sabotaging the miracle of free weather report APIs is just confusing.

If our government were massively in debt and continuing to increase the deficit, maybe I'd understand wanting to consider weather report APIs as a public good worth funding with tax dollars. We should be cutting everything we can to avoid a complete train wreck though, why would this float to the top of the list?

vorgol• 12 months ago

Project 2025 is 46% completed: https://www.project2025.observer/

EvanAnderson• 12 months ago

For now.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/as-trump-slashed-weath...

fitsumbelay2• 12 months ago

Yep

runarb• 12 months ago

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute also have free forecast for any location on earth: https://developer.yr.no/featured-products/forecast/

cyberax• 12 months ago

They won't have access to the same primary data as the NWS. Although it might be an opportunity for something like PurpleAir.

aredox• 12 months ago

The Norwegian meteorological Institute, as well as all European meteorological agencies, shares but also rely on shared data from other agencies, including NOAA. Most of the Atlantic weather buoys, for example...

cmiles74• 12 months ago

AccuWeather has been trying to privatize NWS since it's inception. I believe the current head of the NOAA was actually the AccuWeather CEO. IMHO, it's only a matter of time before he shuts off public access to NSW forecase data, no matter the impact on real people and businesses (except maybe AccuWeather).

https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/politics/noaa-nominee-accuwea...

Brosper• 12 months ago

USA is only one country. What about the rest?

otterley2• 12 months ago

Feel free to add links to the APIs for your countries' meteorological services here. I know about Canada's: https://api.weather.gc.ca

bix6• 12 months ago

NWS costs $1.3B a year and the ROI is 5-11x based on reports I can find. So every $1 gives Americans $11 of value. But yeah let’s trash it to save money or whatever…

pastureofplenty• 12 months ago

I'll just keep scraping

greenavocado• 12 months ago

I can see it already:

In other news, AccuWeather servers overwhelmed with requests after shutting down Weather API

ysavir• 12 months ago

Nah. We just need one source to scrape them and make the results available for others.

Retr0id• 12 months ago

A while back I RE'd the accuweather mobile app and pulled out the API key, it wasn't too hard.

mlhpdx• 12 months ago

If you’d like a preview of what access to weather data will be like (soon) just have a look at access to nautical navigation charts.

andsoitis• 12 months ago

How the winds are changing

donohoe• 12 months ago

"AccuWeather is excited to share important updates"

Yes. Yes, I'm sure you are.

tailspin2019• 12 months ago

Such corporate speak reminds me of “the values of the Carphone Warehouse”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2firijxQOo

amysox• 12 months ago

That's like the old saying that when a company starts its message with "In order to serve you better...", what they really mean is "Bend over and assume the position."

moontear• 12 months ago

"excited" and "designed to elevate your experience" is such a weird way to put this. They are introducing more monetization options, which is their right to do. But different monetization options and discontinuation of a free-tier does not elevate anyone's experience.

micromacrofoot• 12 months ago

the forecast calls for enshittification

firesteelrain• 12 months ago

I assume AccuWeather is receiving large cloud egress bills and thus needs to start charging?

michaelsshaw2• 12 months ago

The NWS is being gutted so Accu is preparing to rake in extortionate profits off public safety information.

stego-tech• 12 months ago

Serious question: what other national or global-level weather services are freely available via API to end users? With AccuWeather going all-in on premium access and the NWS/NOAA being sabotaged, is there anywhere else with freely available high-quality data out there in readily-ingestible formats?

rajh• 12 months ago

In the Netherlands we have the KNMI data platform (https://dataplatform.knmi.nl) and also an open source weather app (https://gitlab.com/KNMI-OSS/KNMI-App).

slenk2• 12 months ago

I noticed that before when looking at some weather APIs. You have a lot better data in Europe available

saint_yossarian• 12 months ago

Here's a convenient list: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather/blob/main/d...

open-meteo• 12 months ago

I’ve been building an open-source weather API over the past few years. It pulls in data from a wide range of global and local high-resolution weather models. The API is free to use without an API key, though there are commercial options available. I'm the sole owner behind it. No VC funding or outside backing.

The core tech is tuned for performance, using local gridded files instead of a traditional database or response caching. This efficiency is what allows it to stay free.

You can try it here: https://open-meteo.com

jamesblonde• 12 months ago

Love open-meteo - no registration or API key required. Great for tutorials. I used it my upcoming O'Reilly book- use weather to predict air quality at the street level: https://github.com/featurestorebook/mlfs-book/

slenk2• 12 months ago

I use that in HomeAssistant. Love it!

dejobaan• 12 months ago

This is fantastic; thank you for it. The "try the API" page is also excellent!

jasonthorsness8• 12 months ago

Awesome, I will change https://weather.bingo to use this service; the previous paid API I used was too expensive to justify given I was the only real user :P.

RebeccaTheDev• 12 months ago

Just wanted to say thank you for this service. I have a little homebrew clock I build from a Raspberry Pi and a small display in my bathroom. Below the time, it displays the weather forecast for the day so I know how to dress. That little clock has become an essential piece of my morning routine.

I switched to Open Meteo a few months ago when the previous API I was using quit working. It's been rock solid and such a nice user experience compared to everything else I tried.

nox_pp2• 12 months ago

Have been meaning to look into OpenMeteo for https://luxweather.com

We've been using OWM but the One Call API quickly gets pricey when traffic spikes.

selecsosi• 12 months ago

Just wanted to say, seeing you in the wild, thank you very much for the hard work you do on OpenMeteo.

Picked up a commercial license about 3 months ago, service is amazing and have been using it for helping to provide runtime data analysis and anomaly detection for smart home thermostats.

wuyishan• 12 months ago

I've recently found https://open-meteo.com/ - maybe that ticks some of the boxes?

Ueland2• 12 months ago

The Norwegian MET does, https://api.met.no/

They also provide yr.no which is widely used worldwide.

theshrike792• 12 months ago

I think yr.no is the default source for Home Assistant

klinquist• 12 months ago

https://pirateweather.net/en/latest/

theshrike792• 12 months ago

Openweathermap works: https://openweathermap.org/price

I've been using their free (2.5?) API for a while and just last week moved on to the paid-but-with-free-tier 3.0 API for more info.

You just need to put in your credit card (most likely to prove you're an actual human being) and that'll net you 1000 requests per day for free.

Then go into the settings and set a hard limit at 999 and you'll never get billed.

If whatever you're doing needs to get weather data more often than once per minute, start charging for it or cache data on your end more aggressively to not hit the limit.

dyeje2• 12 months ago

I imagine there is a lot of new pressure on public APIs now that there’s an explosion of vibe coded projects accessing them (some probably quite haphazardly).

pmdr• 12 months ago

It's probably just good old-fashioned greed. Worked for X and Reddit, why wouldn't it work for them?

dyeje2• 12 months ago

I wasn’t justifying the move, just a related thought that came up after seeing a few articles about Neon and Supabase having an explosion of new apps.

0x457• 12 months ago

Uhm, having a weather api is probably the easiest thing to implement because of how catchable it is. Any public api accidental can be prevented by tiered rate-limiting:

- uber low limits for anon access

- low, but reasonable for register free users

- Up-to-you for paid users

You might say: well, proxies are cheaper than paid plan, and solution to that - charge reasonable price.

sitzkrieg2• 12 months ago

you should see what happened when people finally understood XMLHttpRequest!

jasonthorsness8• 12 months ago

I ran a weather site for a year or so (that also showed YESTERDAY'S weather, that was the key feature) using visual crossing's data, until someone started scraping all the cities of the world every hour and running up my costs (visual crossing is pay-per-data-point) so I had to shut it down.

It surprises me that in 2025 we can't just support global free weather data as some kind of cooperative service. It's not like it's high-bandwidth or even all that high-volume.

dawnerd• 12 months ago

There is public free weather, for now at least, where do you think the private weather companies source it from? They’re just repackaging it.

jasonthorsness8• 12 months ago

The last time I had checked (this was over a year ago) there was nothing that provided world-wide data in a consistent format except the paid APIs, of which only one had a good historical data service.

I could switch my site to just use NWS and be US only I suppose; better than just being completely off. Adding all the weather services of every country in the world is too much for me (and why I guess the paid services are value-add).

tempestn• 12 months ago

Fantastic feature btw; certainly more than once I've wished weather apps/sites would show recent history.

Leftium3• 12 months ago

I wanted the same thing, so I built: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

- I even blogged about this over 10 years ago: https://blog.leftium.com/2013/12/how-to-display-temperature-...

- Previous version used to show two historical days: https://github.com/Leftium/ultra-weather

- The current version is capable of showing the previous 90 days. I plan to add a weekly overview with two previous days.

BTW the https://open-meteo.com API supports getting historical and forecast data in a single call. All other API's require at least two calls.

whalesalad• 12 months ago

Your statements are somewhat contradictory. You said that you were being scraped so you had to shut the service down due to costs... but then you also say that this not a high-bandwidth or high-volume service.

jasonthorsness8• 12 months ago

I was the only regular user (it's basically a POC/concept site), so it was extremely low volume except for the scraper(s), who suddenly became high-volume. I could have done more research into scraper/bot blocking but I didn't have the time and needed to respond to the scrapers immediately, so I pulled the plug.

EDIT: I have also since learned of Vercel's bot/scraper blocking features so I'm also going to try turning those on and see if it stops the scraping.

Leftium3• 12 months ago

My app also shows yesterday's weather: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

- It uses open-meteo's API. Before open-meteo, I tried with OpenWeatherMap's API.

- However, besides requiring an additional call for each previous day's data, OpenWeatherMap's One Call API only supported local time zones for current and forecast data. So depending on the timezone and time, there could be a big gap in the data that needed to be filled with timezone math (and extra API calls. The original DarkSky One Call API did not have this issue.)

mkerrigan• 12 months ago

OpenWeather still has a free tier. https://openweathermap.org/

Sohcahtoa822• 12 months ago

Yup! I use it for an IRC bot that allows users to request the current weather or a forecast for a location.

Unfortunately, the API for searching for a location is terrible and often gets locations wrong.

SSJPython• 12 months ago

Why is something so essential, so basic, like the weather forecast being privatized? Why is everything becoming so shit?

CamperBob2• 12 months ago

Because stupid people are easy to herd to the polls.

swyx• 12 months ago

because good data costs money?

how would you feel if you were the SWE on the other side of this API and people demand it for free

masklinn• 12 months ago

Because nothing can exist in America if middlemen don’t make money out of it, the more the better.

You can see a literal example of that thinking in the comments of _heimdall for whom valuable commons are unexploited business cases.

gaws• 12 months ago

Everything's getting more expensive, and people need to get paid.

fitsumbelay2• 12 months ago

As @otterly already posted there has, is and will always be weather.gov

As a matter of fact US Commerce department provides many API services including free geolocation (wuuut) via census.gov among so many services

A side note about Trump and politics/shmolitix etc: his stageshow budget cuts will have short term impact but will likely be repaired when the House flips and Dems make gains in the Senate after the mid terms. A lot of White Americans living at or below the poverty line will be hurt by the scheduled cuts and will have questions n' thoughts, but man this Epstein footcannon-nuclear-grenade-launcher of Trump's just might be the thing that ends Republican Party's 10 year abusive relations with an objectively adjudicated and multifacted criminal

mindslight2• 12 months ago

Have you not been paying attention for the past several decades? Trump is unprecedented in audacity, crassness, and degree of harm. But the overall trend is right in line with what Republicans have been doing for thirty+ years (at least as long as I've been paying attention). And no, the destruction does not cause people to vote Democrat in response. People become more desperate, more reactionary, more quick to blame their fellow citizens, and more easy to lead towards supporting even more destruction - this is exactly how we've arrived at Trump in the first place. When the Democrats do get back in office, they effectively act as controlled opposition. Even if they try to undo the damage, most actions are sabotaged by a few "moderates" that have been captured by the corpos just like the Republicans. And then the Republican machine goes to work projecting - pointing to the Democrats' failings as open corruption, inability to do anything, fiscal irresponsibility as price inflation finally appears from the Republicans' profligate spending, etc.

Personally I'm not really worried about the "no more elections" panic narrative, because I think the real answer is that there isn't going to be much of a federal government left to take the reigns of.

Applejinx2• 12 months ago

The scientists I know have been pretty loud about there being no good way to repair what's been broken. Stuff can't just be turned on again.

I do expect more than just flipping off a switch: at some level there'll be outright sabotage, of data systems or physical hardware or both, for the purposes of destroying what is being made to go away.

This is because that's why it's being done. Budget concerns were never the point. It's the wholesale destruction of American soft power and indispensable systems. That's why I expect physical sabotage under cover of 'decommissioning'.

jeffbee• 12 months ago

White Americans have been self-sabotaging for 150 years and it is fine with them, they are completely happy with this situation as long as Black Americans are harmed at least as much. This is the only motivating reason behind about a third of the American electorate.

ChrisArchitect• 12 months ago

Pirate Weather API https://pirateweather.net/en/latest/ which powers Merry Sky http://merrysky.net/

skeptrune2• 12 months ago

Brings back good memories. One of the first things I ever built was a Twitter weather bot using their free API.

pimlottc• 12 months ago

I assume you meant “weather bot”

skeptrune2• 12 months ago

Yes lol

sitzkrieg2• 12 months ago

im still mad apple bought and killed darksky. ripped one of the best weather apis

superxpro12• 12 months ago

Thank you for my daily trigger.... I am also still mad about this.

JoshGlazebrook• 12 months ago

Another one bites the dust. I've used weather underground api, yahoo weather api, dark sky api, and all of them have gone from free to paid (or just not public anymore) over the years. Currently using pirate weather - https://pirateweather.net/en/latest/

scarface_743• 12 months ago

Dark Sky was never free for unlimited use.

It’s now Apple’s WeatherKit.

The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year Apple Developer account and there is a standard REST API for none Apple OS’s.

kjkjadksj3• 12 months ago

I feel its not nearly as useful as the old darksky api. The secret sauce of that software was that it combined typical weather data with local reports. Afaik there is no way to submit a weather report on the apple weather app. They bought it for the name and to kill a competing option essentially vs attempting to use what made that app actually compelling compared to other weather apps.

margalabargala4• 12 months ago

The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year[...]

They may be included with your $99/year subscription, but to call them "free" is like saying that the groceries I'm holding are free because I just gave the cashier money.

ge963• 12 months ago

Is there any way people would be incentivized to setup a little weather station/contribute to data and get paid. Wonder if there's a model where people could make money/not game the system too. It would have to be standardized/verified to be accurate somehow.

wmeredith• 12 months ago

Wonder if there's a model where people could make money/not game the system too.

We're up against the most basic of human nature here.

Aurornis2• 12 months ago

Blockchain people have been trying variations of this for a decade. Any time you create a system that pays people for data, it will be exploited to the extreme.

I don’t think you need to incentivize people to provide weather data. Just make it easy to set up a station and get a lot of people interested. There are already hobby stations out there and networks for them.

arghwhat• 12 months ago

You need to collect data and run the weather models, which for good ones could require a lot of continuous compute resources.

avhon12• 12 months ago

People pay to have a tempest weather station

https://tempest.earth/tempest-home-weather-system/

WillAdams2• 12 months ago

Isn't that Weather Underground's schtick?

asteroidburger• 12 months ago

Many people have no problem setting up a station and giving away the data for free.

https://map.purpleair.com/

This is primarily for air quality by default, but you can get temperature, humidity, etc as well. For each station, someone paid for the hardware and is sharing the data gratis.

vlod• 12 months ago

It would have to be standardized/verified to be accurate somehow.

You could do something that for the same zip/county, aggregates the results based on a certain percentage. You could weight it based on how many times a user is outside this range. (e.g. bad actors)

I just got zigbee working in my house (SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway). Is there any recommended weather nuts out there that could recommend a weather device (that they like and is cool), just in case someone wants to create a project and is looking for data providers.

adolph• 12 months ago

There are a few models for community data collection/distribution that appear reasonably successful in ADS-B and bird tracking with commercial, non-commercial and academic examples. The challenge is that there are hard costs to collecting/persisting/distributing the data which are incompatible with free (which in reality just means someone else pays).

https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-it-works/

https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/

https://www.birdweather.com/about

https://ebird.org/about

bigiain4• 12 months ago

I'd be a little surprised if Google (or even Apple) haven't considered trying to use cell phone temp and pressure sensor data collected across the entire fleet of devices running their OS. Similar to the recent Android earthquake warning thing, or Google's traffic data.

Like others have pointed out though, gathering observation data is only part of the problem. Turning current and historical observations into usable and accurate forecasts is a big compute heavy task, and whoever is paying for that compute needs either government funding, which is not easy in the age of DOGE, or to charge for the forecasts.

I have a weather station that collects temp, pressure, wind speed and direction rainfall - and which has wifi and built in capability to send it's data to a bunch of web services. Sadly, it's still in the box it came in because I haven't got around to installing it and the burst of enthusiasm the inspired me to buy it has long since died. (If anyone in Sydney Australia wants it, reply here and we might be able to organise for you to come collect it.)

munk-a• 12 months ago

This feels like a great thing for the government to do which is why NOAA/NWS have traditionally maintained these services. The data these stations produce nationally is valuable but hard to quantify on an individual station level - should the station that detects vital data about a hurricane be given a large bonus for it? If so we'll end up with extremely lopsided coverage while the information from nearby weather systems can be invaluable.

kawfey• 12 months ago

same model as flightaware et al use for crowdsourced ADS-B air traffic monitoring. You set up an ADS-B receiving station, send your feed to FA, and in return you get a premium-level account.

kjkjadksj3• 12 months ago

Aren’t all these services just abrogating some national weather service data? Is that api exposed to the public?

jimmaswell• 12 months ago

Yes, and it's a free public service as I would expect. https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

squigz• 12 months ago

It's almost as if APIs cost money to run?!

Havoc• 12 months ago

The march towards walled gardens continues.

The internet as we know it (blogs etc) is going to stop existing and this will just turn into an protocol layer communicating between said walled gardens

Bit miffed that the big tech orgs basically killed something that could be organic & community driven. If somehow a path could have been found to maintain and possibly even scale that sort of grassroot internet I think it could have turned into something unimaginably awesome. Big tech actively killed that trajectory

gip• 12 months ago

WalleD gardens and walleT gardens - e.g. micropayments will make it possible to monetize data to the fullest and every users will need a wallet to access anything fresh online. That seems to be the trend, but I suspect a counter-trend will emerge too.

Zenbit_UX• 12 months ago

Sure Apple, fb and LinkedIn were private gardens before it was cool, but there was still some incentive for some companies to stay public. That is until the AI wars and scrapping the entire internet constantly for training data was the norm.

lxgr2• 12 months ago

Semi off-topic, but does anybody know a good weather radar app that has coverage outside the US (with particular interest in Europe)?

Apple/Dark Sky seems to only cover a very limited number of countries (despite many more providing radar data under open access), and zoom.earth seems to be shutting down precipitation radar by September.

hnburnsy• 12 months ago

Windy

jonp888• 12 months ago

I use WetterOnline, it's German but I think it covers all of Europe.

frm88• 12 months ago

I second windy. Very detailed and precise. Supports several models/data sources like ECMWF, Arome, Meteo Blue etc. They still have a free tier with a 5-day forecast and a very expensive premium tier (10 days, I believe??) - but everything longer than 5 days tends to get increasingly im precise anyways.

lxgr2• 12 months ago

My use case is usually evading thunderstorms when cycling/hiking, which are ~impossible to predict more than a few hours ahead of time anyway, so this works perfectly. Thank you!

Leftium3• 12 months ago

I'm working on a weather web app that has world-wide radar coverage: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

The radar data is from the RainViewer API: https://www.rainviewer.com/api.html

- Hmm... it seems this API is also being limited/discontinued...

- I think past radar will continue to work, but only to zoom level 10/7.

- And the future 30-90 minutes of predicted radar will no longer work.

My project was inspired by: https://merrysky.net (And the OG Dark Sky UI)

bhickey• 12 months ago

Time to dust off CloudyFS, the first filesystem to put the clouds in your files.

https://github.com/bhickey/cloudyfs

jvanderbot• 12 months ago

Strange timing, with all the talk of NOAA cuts.

thegreatpeter• 12 months ago

It is truly remarkable how some of those affluent & resourceful devs in the world come here to complain about an API that now requires a subscription.

Somebody, somewhere in the world has to build & maintain this API. Somebody's job depends on it. If you use it and you find it useful, you can afford to pay whatever they're willing to charge.

Otherwise, build & maintain your own. Make sure you never charge for it!!

wild_pointer• 12 months ago

https://wttr.in/ ftw

throw4847285• 12 months ago

A dark day for State College. What's next? No more Peachy Paterno at the Creamery? The Waffle Shop burning down?

burnt-resistor• 12 months ago

Enshitification and hyperinflation marches on, powered by the leadership of DOGE.

I used ForecastBar until they went to a rent-only-but-never-own model where a frickin' weather app has tiers. WTF!? Don't get me started on the weather.com apps either.

scarface_743• 12 months ago

Just an FYI: almost all third party weather apps including AccuWeather are privacy invasive

https://www.vice.com/en/article/stop-using-third-party-weath...

pelcg• 12 months ago

Important update

Any title that starts with that is never a good update.

KoftaBob• 12 months ago

If you want to skip the middleman and integrate the national weather service APIs that many countries governments provide (and which most commercial APIs base their data on anyway), check out this library.

It unifies weather data from official national weather service APIs across the US, Canada, Mexico, and major European countries.

https://github.com/ghobs91/UniWeather.js

AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API

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