Take your time choosing the weather API that works best for you. Meditating in the mountains is optional. 🧘
Almost every weather API you can sign up for today is built on the same foundation, numerical models run by national weather services: NOAA in North America, ECMWF in Europe, and so many others around the globe and for each country.
What differs is what each provider does with that model output before it reaches you, and how far off the numbers can be for the one location you actually care about.
The comparison
We’ve compared the self-serve products you can sign up for and price without talking to anyone, using each provider’s own documentation and pricing pages. Everyone here, Meteosource included, offers more at enterprise level on request.
Checked in September 2026. Weather APIs change their tiers fairly often, so it’s worth confirming prices on each provider’s own site before you commit.
| Meteosource | OpenWeather | Open-Meteo | Visual Crossing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published resolution | 90 m to a few hundred m, from the free tier | 100 m short-range, enterprise only | 1–2 km regional, 9–25 km global | 2 km in many places |
| Minute-level rain | 60 min, worldwide, all paid tiers | One Call API only, separate subscription | 15-min steps, not nowcasting | 15-min steps, US and southern Canada only |
| Update frequency | every 10 minutes from radar and stations | every 10 minutes | hourly in Europe and North America | not published |
| Forecast sentences | full summaries, 7 languages | full sentence summaries, language count not published | numeric weather code only | full daily descriptions, 4 languages |
| Renewables pricing | $19 per location, self-serve | €300 per location/month | – | higher tiers only |
| Attribution required | free tier only | free through Professional plans | every tier, including paid | Pay-as-you-go and Pro levels |
| Entry price | 400 calls/day free, from $9/mo | 1,000 calls/day free | 10,000/day, non-commercial | 1,000 records/day free |
Renewables data is where the pricing gets interesting. Most providers have it, but behind the expensive door: Visual Crossing bundles it into their Corporate tier, and OpenWeather charges €300 per location per month for panel production forecasts. Meteosource charges $19 per location, you sign up for it yourself, and the 10-day trial includes five locations.
What actually makes the difference
How we build the forecast
Meteosource blends more than 40 global models using machine learning trained on our own archive of past forecasts, and on the specific mistakes each model has made in particular places and weather situations. A model that reliably runs too warm in an alpine valley in February gets weighted down there, and only there. Our own regional model then factors in local terrain, and a further AI layer refines the result where there are weather stations nearby. A meteorologist on duty can adjust the inputs when a situation develops strangely.
Metres instead of kilometres
A 10 km grid cell averages the valley floor together with the ridge above it. If your users are somewhere flat you’ll never notice. In mountains or along a coast it changes everything. Meteosource resolves to roughly 90 m in some regions and a few hundred metres in others. Ask for a mountain by its place_id and you get the forecast for the summit’s real elevation.
It keeps updating after the model run
Most self-serve APIs give you the latest model run and then wait for the next one. Meteosource keeps refining its forecast from live radar and station data every 10 minutes, and every forecast point carries a predictability score, so you know how much confidence to put in it.
Try it
Sign up free for 400 calls a day, no card. Or take the 10-day Standard trial and compare against whatever you’re using now. Full pricing is here.
