The short version: it's free, and it stays free. This page explains the access levels and how to keep the lights on.
There is no paid data tier. Nothing is metered, nothing is locked. Sponsoring exists to fund the cluster, not to gate features.
We publish a quarterly transparency report on the forum. Roughly:
| Cost item | Share of budget | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ingest cluster (3 regions) | 58% | Polling 40k+ stations + national feeds, ~14 TB/month |
| Historical archive storage | 21% | 1980–present hourly data, ~61 TB and growing |
| Bandwidth + anycast | 15% | ~2.1 billion requests per month |
| Domain, email, misc | 6% | freeweatherapi.org renewal, mailing list, accountant |
One-off or monthly donations via Ko-fi (ko-fi.com/freeweatherapi) and GitHub Sponsors (github.com/sponsors/freeweatherapi). Even the price of one coffee a month covers about a million API calls. Donors get a badge on the forum and our eternal gratitude.
If you ship a product on top of freeweatherapi.org, please take a $99/month sponsorship — it's the difference between breaking even and worrying about the archive. Sponsors are listed on the homepage and in the quarterly report. Write to sponsors@freeweatherapi.org.
Model and observation data is licensed CC BY 4.0. If your app displays weather from the API, include a visible line like “Weather data by freeweatherapi.org” linking to the homepage. Some upstream feeds (a handful of national services) carry stricter terms — we list them all, with the exact credit lines, on the attribution page.
The full archive is mirrored quarterly to public storage, and the ingest pipeline is open source — so even in the worst case the data survives and someone else can stand it up. It's a hobby project with an exit plan.