And we are very determined to keep the Open-Meteo weather API open-access indefinitely and don’t share the same fate as many closed-source APIs like Yahoo or OpenWeatherMap.
Hi, creator of Open-Meteo here. The limits are 600 calls / min, 5.000 calls / hour and 10.000 calls / day. Limits are applied on an IP basis.
This is not ideal for shared hosting services like cloudflare workers, but is the easiest and privacy-friendly way to limit access to fair-use.
Additionally, weather data is uploaded to a AWS S3 open-data sponsorship and you can run your own API instances (even commercially). The only draw back is, that a lot of data needs to transferred. I am working on a S3 cloud-native approach, but it is still in testing.
The free tier is cross-financed by commercial customers that use the service for energy forecasting, agriculture planing or wild fire prevention. There is no external funding, VCs, or whatsoever, the code is build in public on GitHub and I intent to continue running the free API service as is.
You rang ;-) I’m in the middle of adding more ECMWF data that will be released as open data starting October 1st. At the moment, only a limited set of lower-resolution (0.25°) ECMWF forecasts can be shared open-data. That’s going to change in a big way, though I can’t share more details just yet.
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.