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Comment by jasonthorsness | Hacker News Reader

I ran a weather site for a year or so (that also showed YESTERDAY'S weather, that was the key feature) using visual crossing's data, until someone started scraping all the cities of the world every hour and running up my costs (visual crossing is pay-per-data-point) so I had to shut it down.

It surprises me that in 2025 we can't just support global free weather data as some kind of cooperative service. It's not like it's high-bandwidth or even all that high-volume.

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There is public free weather, for now at least, where do you think the private weather companies source it from? They’re just repackaging it.

The last time I had checked (this was over a year ago) there was nothing that provided world-wide data in a consistent format except the paid APIs, of which only one had a good historical data service.

I could switch my site to just use NWS and be US only I suppose; better than just being completely off. Adding all the weather services of every country in the world is too much for me (and why I guess the paid services are value-add).

The Norwegian MET has had it for years, for free. https://api.met.no/

They also provide yr.no which is widely used worldwide.

gnome use this in their weather app.

https://open-meteo.com/

Looks promising, thanks!

Update: this worked; I switched to Open Meteo and brought back the site (also bot protections are on and seem to be blocking some stuff so hopefully that keeps things under the Open Meteo limit.)

My app also shows yesterday's weather: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

- It uses open-meteo's API. Before open-meteo, I tried with OpenWeatherMap's API.

- However, besides requiring an additional call for each previous day's data, OpenWeatherMap's One Call API only supported local time zones for current and forecast data. So depending on the timezone and time, there could be a big gap in the data that needed to be filled with timezone math (and extra API calls. The original DarkSky One Call API did not have this issue.)

Fantastic feature btw; certainly more than once I've wished weather apps/sites would show recent history.

I wanted the same thing, so I built: https://weather-sense.leftium.com

- I even blogged about this over 10 years ago: https://blog.leftium.com/2013/12/how-to-display-temperature-...

- Previous version used to show two historical days: https://github.com/Leftium/ultra-weather

- The current version is capable of showing the previous 90 days. I plan to add a weekly overview with two previous days.

BTW the https://open-meteo.com API supports getting historical and forecast data in a single call. All other API's require at least two calls.

Your statements are somewhat contradictory. You said that you were being scraped so you had to shut the service down due to costs... but then you also say that this not a high-bandwidth or high-volume service.

I was the only regular user (it's basically a POC/concept site), so it was extremely low volume except for the scraper(s), who suddenly became high-volume. I could have done more research into scraper/bot blocking but I didn't have the time and needed to respond to the scrapers immediately, so I pulled the plug.

EDIT: I have also since learned of Vercel's bot/scraper blocking features so I'm also going to try turning those on and see if it stops the scraping.

For https://luxweather.com I detect bots/scrapers by user agent and just serve them a fake forecast, brought our bill way down :)

Ha that's a great idea; proactive anti-bot solutions like that are hilarious

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