Do you know what the one thing you can’t control is that can be like throwing a wrench into your business plans?
Weather.
One single week of heavy rain can mean that the project gets delayed because the construction site sits empty, and if you know anything about construction, then you’re painfully aware of the fact that an empty construction site is a ridiculously expensive construction site.
And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. If the rain decides to fall, it’s going to fall.
That doesn’t mean you can plan around it, though, and for that, you’d need a weather API.
Top Weather APIs
Whether you like to admit it or not, weather has a big effect on businesses. You can either make sure you somehow plan around that and protect your business, or you can bury your head in the sand and keep your fingers crossed that nothing bad happens.
If you don’t think surprises will benefit your business, here are some weather APIs to look into.
Visual Crossing
The first API on the list is created by Visual Crossing. The reason why it’s first is that it’s designed not only for long-term accuracy and reliability, but also to save developers time – which is very handy when you want to plan ahead.
The APi was designed to cut time spent on unnecessary work and it does so by combining multiple features into one single API instead of requiring multiple to be synced into one app. This means that devs have everything in one place.
For all locations covered, you get rain, temp, wind, humidity, cloud cover, and similar data. And to make things even more efficient, you also get search that’s very practical – search by city, coordinates, address, postal code, etc., allowing you flexibility and pinpoint accuracy.
One of the most prominent features here is probably Query Builder, which enables you to put together a query and then download the results. It’s a no-code feature, which can be extremely effective because it allows non-coders to test and use it.
Regarding plans, a free plan IS available, and it provides you with a solid amount of 1,000 weather records daily. But if it happens that the 1k isn’t enough, you can always pay $0.0001 (USD) for each record above that. But do keep in mind that a PRO subscription costs you only $35/month and allows you to use 10 million records per month, which is 96.5% more affordable than what it’d cost you to pay the amount using the free plan.
In other words, at 351,000 records, the sub breaks even and becomes the better deal.
WeatherAPI.com
WeatherAPI also comes with a free plan, which means you get to play around with it first before paying for it. It comes with 100,000 calls a month, which is a pretty decent amount, and it’s certainly enough for testing.
As for the historical data, you get 1 day of that, as well as a 3-day forecast. Those who are willing to pay for WeatherAPI’s service can pick between several plans – the Starter plan costs $7 a month (3 million calls), Pro+ costs $25 (for 5 million calls), and the Business plan (which is also the most expensive one) costs $65 a month and gives you 10 million calls.
So, why would you choose this API?
Well, the selling point is pretty simple: you pay for one service, but get a lot of stuff.
Obviously, you get current conditions and forecasts, but you also get historical weather, marine data, air quality, information on pollen count, astronomy data, and so on. What you get depends on the plan, of course, but the list of features is pretty extensive. You may not need all of it, but it’s nice to know you can have it if and when you do.
You can make requests through a REST API, and then download the results in either JSON or XML format.
OpenWeather
You can’t talk about weather APIs and not mention OpenWeather. It’s popular for a reason, so you should at least look into it before making a decision on which API you’ll go with. There are a lot of features to choose from, but you can start with the basics if you don’t need anything else and then build on that as you go along.
One Call API 4.0 is one of the most popular features here, and that has a separate price.
We’ll get into the general plans a little later, but for this one specifically, you can get 1,000 calls a day on the free tier. After that, you’ll need to pay $0.0015 for every additional call.
Aside from One Call API 4.0, you can get a regular free plan that gets you 60 calls a minute and a million calls per month.
If you’re still in the process of building an app, that should work just fine. Any more than that, and you’ll pay for a plan that goes from $40 a month for the cheapest one to $1,200 a month.
Conclusion
There were only 3 weather APIs presented here, but as you can see, there’s a lot to think about.
Luckily, they all have free plans, so it’s not like you’ll pay for something that could end up being a total bust.
It’s always smart to do some research on your own, but whatever you do, DO NOT pick the first thing Google shows you. There are other great weather APIs that didn’t make it onto this list, and you might be happy with one of them, but don’t rush.
Take your time and test whatever you can before signing up for a subscription.
