Why We Use Open-Meteo for the Forecast
When we built the forecast tool, the data source mattered more than anything else. We wanted something free for users, private, and simple enough to call straight from the browser. Open-Meteo ticked every box.
Free, open and key-less
Open-Meteo blends data from national weather services and global forecast models, and offers free access for non-commercial use with no API key. That means the tool works the instant the page loads — there is no sign-up, no dashboard, and no secret to leak. It is also CORS-friendly, so the browser can call it directly without us proxying every request through a server.
What we ask for, and nothing more
Each request sends only the coordinates of the place you chose and asks for the fields the UI shows: current conditions and a seven-day daily summary. We map the returned WMO weather codes to friendly labels and icons in the browser. No account, no history, no profile — just a forecast for a point on the map.
What we gave up
A key-less public API has limits. There is no service-level agreement behind free non-commercial access, so an outage or a rate limit is visible to users rather than absorbed by a paid tier, and we cannot request proprietary fields that commercial providers gate behind a plan. We accepted that because the alternative — a server-side key and a proxy — would mean routing every user's location through infrastructure we control, which is exactly what the privacy-first design set out to avoid.
The same source feeds the UV index
The UV Index tool calls the same API for current, hourly and daily UV values, so both tools share one location picker and one set of assumptions. Alerts and hurricanes come from different sources — the US National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center — because Open-Meteo does not publish official warning products.
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