alt Hacker NewsThis is a very confusingly worded.
I think what they mean is that the data and code itself is libre/free/open [0] [1] but the API access is essentially rate limited for non-paying customers?
[0] https://open-meteo.com/en/licence (CC-BY)
[1] https://github.com/open-meteo/open-meteo/blob/main/LICENSE (AGPL)
Replies
tedivm • yesterday at 5:47 PM
Most APIs, even ones you pay for, are rate limited. I don't think having a rate limit changes the open nature of the API. I'm looking forward to seeing if I can plug this in to my Home Assistant install for weather so I can compare it to Pirate Weather which I use now.
➕ show 1 reply
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.