Choosing a weather API is less about finding the provider with the biggest feature list and more about matching its coverage, forecast data, usage terms, and price to your app. A free developer tier may exclude commercial use, restrict forecast endpoints, or become expensive when every visitor triggers a request.
This guide compares maintained options for small apps and services. Provider plans change, so use the linked documentation and pricing pages to confirm current limits before you ship.
Weather APIs to consider
| API | A good fit for | Important limits to check |
|---|---|---|
| National Weather Service API | U.S.-focused forecasts, observations, and alerts | U.S. coverage only. No fee or API key is required, but send an identifying User-Agent, cache responses, and respect the service's unpublished rate limits. |
| Open-Meteo | Prototypes and non-commercial apps that need global forecast data without an API key | Its free API is for non-commercial use, is limited to 10,000 calls per day, and has no uptime guarantee. The data uses CC BY 4.0 attribution. Commercial use requires a subscription and customer endpoint; see the current usage terms and pricing. |
| OpenWeather (API reference) | Apps that need a broader set of current, forecast, and historical weather products | Each product has its own access and billing terms. The current One Call 4.0 pricing lists the first 1,000 calls per day as free, then charges GBP 0.0012 per additional call. Check the live price and endpoint terms for the exact product you plan to use. |
| WeatherAPI.com | A single API for current conditions, forecasts, and related weather data | The published free plan currently lists 100,000 calls per month. Forecast range, history, commercial-use rights, and other features vary by plan; check the pricing matrix rather than assuming every endpoint is included. |
| Weatherbit | Current conditions and daily forecasts, with a clear path to higher-volume plans | Its free plan currently lists current weather and 7-day daily forecasts at 50 requests per day for non-commercial use. Commercial use requires an eligible paid plan; confirm current terms on the pricing page. |
| Tomorrow.io (API reference) | Apps evaluating a hosted forecast API with additional weather data products | ClimaCell now redirects to Tomorrow.io. Use the current API reference and confirm the available products, free-tier limits, and commercial terms with the provider; do not rely on old ClimaCell quota or pricing claims. |
OpenWeather, WeatherAPI.com, Weatherbit, and Tomorrow.io require an account or API key for their hosted services. Keep keys on a server you control when the provider's terms allow it; do not embed a private key in JavaScript shipped to every browser or commit it to a repository.
Other established providers include AccuWeather's developer portal and World Weather Online's weather API. Compare their current packages, location coverage, response fields, and redistribution rights before choosing them; old plan descriptions are not a substitute for current terms.
The Weatherstack pricing page currently lists a free plan with 100 calls per month for non-commercial use and real-time weather. That is a small sandbox, not the old 1,000-calls-per-month claim or a general-purpose free forecast plan. Its current API documentation describes the available endpoints.
Do not reuse old Weather Underground API quotas or pricing from archived roundups. Its former API URL now redirects to an account login rather than current developer documentation.
Make a small test request
For a non-commercial prototype, Open-Meteo's public forecast endpoint can be called without an API key. This request asks for current conditions and daily values for New York:
GET https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=40.7128&longitude=-74.0060¤t=temperature_2m,relative_humidity_2m,precipitation,weather_code&daily=temperature_2m_max,temperature_2m_min,precipitation_probability_max&timezone=America%2FNew_York
The response separates current values and daily forecasts into current and daily objects. Choose the variables and timezone your interface actually uses, and follow Open-Meteo's attribution and usage terms. For a paid app or business service, use a plan that explicitly permits the intended commercial use.
A practical selection checklist
- Test the locations that matter. Compare a few target coordinates, including rural or coastal areas if your users live there. Coverage, forecast horizon, and update frequency can differ by product and location.
- Check the data contract. Confirm commercial use, redistribution in an app, required attribution, caching, historical-data retention, and whether a free plan covers the forecast fields you need.
- Estimate requests before launch. A page view can create several API calls. Cache responses on a schedule suited to the provider's update cadence, and avoid requesting the same location separately for every visitor.
- Protect keys and locations. Keep private keys out of public client bundles. Send only the location precision your feature needs, and explain location use to people using the app.
- Plan for failure. Handle timeouts, authentication errors,
429responses, and provider outages. Respect retry guidance, back off rather than retrying in a tight loop, and label cached forecasts with their retrieval time instead of presenting stale data as live.
For a U.S.-only project, start by checking whether the National Weather Service API covers the locations and data you need. For a non-commercial prototype, compare Open-Meteo's terms with your requirements. For a commercial product, shortlist providers only after confirming forecast coverage, usage rights, and the full cost at your expected request volume.
If you are designing a weather app, these free weather icon sets can help with its interface. Treat icons and API values separately: map each provider's documented condition codes to your chosen icon set rather than assuming different APIs use the same codes.
Amezing man. I was lloking for particuler link from hell lot of time. you save my time. Thanks :)
I am glad you found it useful. :)
Hi Kanishk, great list. Can I recommend a really cool weather API which has just been launched – WeatherTrigger API.
It lets you query past, current, and forecast weather data for world-wide locations, returning a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response, which can be used to trigger an action. You can make the weather trigger any action you want. It’s free to integrate and start using, here’s the link: https://developer.weatherunlocked.com/ Let me know what you think. Thanks!
WeatherUnlocked’s some datas are wrong. Sunrise, sunset, current temprature eg. Also it returns wrong coordinates to json than you give from url. Support is absolutely amateur. So you don’t use weatherunlocked api.
Awesome!
Take a look also at Metwit weather api: http://metwit.com/weather-api/
We are crowdsourced weather API, something little different and innovative
;)
Hi,
we need to access current weather and forecast weather through API or FTP.
if there is any paid subscription for this information through API and FTP
can you please send all details in mail and send me on my mail id.
Our requirement is to know the current weather and forecast weather information for US.
can you please help me out on this,we are interested to buy.
Thanks
You may try http://www.apixu.com as they offer both free and paid.
Also http://developer.worldweatheronline.com offers freemium packages.
Hope this helps.
You can also try to use Planet OS Datahub API http://data.planetos.com (contains over 2,000 climate and weather variables)
If you want to check the API endpoints immediately feel free to look at the docs http://docs.planetos.com/#dataset-endpoints
Disclaimer: I work at Planet OS and very excited about it :-)
I have tried some of these services and here is my short review:
– Open Weather Map – Fast and generous but not very accurate for some regions.
– AccuWeather – Very accurate but I could not use my API key and the support team didn’t respond to my email!
– Forecast.io – Very fast, good API documentations but just like Open Weather Map the data is not very accurate for particular regions outside of USA.
I finally decided to use Wunderground weather service for my website. The free plan is limited but it was good enough for my needs.
–
I would recommend giving https://www.weatherbit.io a try. They have the exact same volume tiers as OpenWeatherMap, but they also give access to historical data. They also have a pretty generous free tier.
AccuWeather now offers a new API Developer Portal for easier access of the API: https://developer.accuweather.com/
@Colin : the free plan openweathermap give more than the Megan plan of weatherbit .. ( 60 Calls per minute => 86400 / days )
Dear folks,
This might blow your mind: At Meteomatics you can have not only access to different weather forecasts based, for instance, on the global European model but also radar, satellite, ocean, terrain, tides data… And a downscaling of these data (times series, gridded, etc.) in up to 90m resolution:
https://www.meteomatics.com/weather-api/en
On top they support different programming languages like Python, Matlab, R, C++, Java…
An extensive online documentation can be found here:
https://api.meteomatics.com
Best regards
Martin
Check OpenUV – Global real-time UV Index Forecast API: https://www.openuv.io for ultraviolet index report
Wow Martin !
Your service is ***starting*** at 250 € per month
Why that means ***starting*** at only 3000€ per year.
Seems ideal for any home use application.
And in other news, both Yahoo Weather and Weather Underground (the two services apparently used the same data source) have from December 31st, 2018 discontinued their free weather data service.
Why would I use a free, open source API rather than a super nice service starting at just 250 € per month? Good try, Martin!
Great post
Checkout Ambee’s weather api: https://www.getambee.com/api/weather
Data is really accurate.
Hi Kanishk,
Awesome article! I wanted to encourage you to check out AerisWeather: https://www.aerisweather.com/
AerisWeather’s API provides a broad range of hyper-local environmental data for global businesses. Our API meets the demands of developers, product managers, and data scientists around the globe with access to historical datasets, granular forecasts, and unique data endpoints like severe weather alerts, tropical storms, air quality, lightning strikes, and wildfires. See them all in the Weather API Documentation and try the API Wizard to craft your API requests immediately.
I think it would be a great addition to your article, and I’d be happy to discuss how to make that happen.
Thank you!
The company I work for, Visual Crossing, offers a Weather API that includes 15-day forecast, hourly and sub-hourly historical data. We offer 1000 free results per day and then pricing starts at $0.0001/result. There are also monthly plans for higher volume users.
Please see http://www.visualcrossing.com/weather-api for more information.
Regards
Andrew
Hi Kanishk,
great to see the list of Weather forecast APIs. Can I recommend one more weather API provider to your list – Ambee-Environmental Intelligence Company. Check out: https://www.getambee.com/api/weather
Thanks,