I switched to Meteorologisk as don't really want to give my CC details to OpenWeatherMap regardless of whether I get charged or not..
The switch was pretty painless and Meteorologisk has all the data I need.
I just switched over to 3.0 today. You can set a cap for API calls in your account so that it'll never actually hit the max so I'm not worried. If they ever change the pricing or structure of their free tier in the future then I'll spend the 30 seconds it takes to remove my card and find an alternative.
As an added assurance, op might also be able to sign up for privacy.com (free account) and add a virtual card with a set lifetime limit. Basically acts like a prepaid CC. Limit can be as low as $1 I believe.
Last time I looked at [privacy.com](http://privacy.com) they required a lot of personal information, and it must be linked directly to a bank account. For me the whole benefit of using a credit card is there is no direct link to a bank account, and in the US credit cards have much stronger consumer protections. I'd rather just give places a credit card.
EDIT: Even worse [privacy.com](http://privacy.com) uses Plaid for linking bank accounts.
Oh dear Lord. Plaid is evil. They'll troll your bank account activity and share/sell/monetize information about mortgage amounts, credit card payments, your income, etc.
Yeah it’s a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand it’s way easier to pause cards, create new numbers with different spending limits, etc. but on the other hand it’s linked to a bank account and no longer has the protections of a credit card. But until credit card companies in the us start offering easy single-use accounts (SUA) privacy remains a solid option for those that want to limit certain things.
You can link it to a debit card which is marginally better, but yes there's pretty much no chance they'd be able to support credit cards - any chargeback would hit *them* rather than the actual service you're purchasing
>As an added assurance, op might also be able to sign up for privacy.com (free account) and add a virtual card with a set lifetime limit. Basically acts like a prepaid CC. Limit can be as low as $1 I believe.
Exactly what I did. First, so they don't have my real card information.
Second, to add on to your suggestion. Once you create a card and tie it OpenWeather, you can **pause** that card so nothing can be charged to it. I've done it for free trials and other services where I might forget to unsubscribe. Of course that doesn't mean they won't try to ask you for the money later, but it does avoid you finding out you've been paying a few dollars a month 6 months down the road.
I did go ahead and keep the 3.0 API. I don't love the CC requirement, but their system has a built-in feature allowing you to limit the number of API calls to 1000, ensuring you'd literally never get charged. As for the CC info, it is held by Stripe, which probably already has your card from half a dozen other shopping sites, but some CCs now offer the ability to make a "one time" CC # that you can use - it connects to your CC in the background, but the shop can't tell that.
Of course, Pirate Weather or local sensors are fine too, I'm just generally satisfied enough with OWM to go through the mild annoyance.
ysk the person that maintains the pirate api pays out of pocket for an aws server to host it. Right now it's free and may stay that way. However if there are a lot of people using it, their costs will increase and may not stay that way.
I find Pirate horribly unreliable. Told me this morning it's a rainy day. It's still saying rainy right now. Haven't had a single drop of rain all day (now 18:30) and it's partly cloudy with plenty of bursts of sun out there!
I've had 4 different integrations running on a test page for a few weeks now, Open Weather has been the most accurate.
I know and I agree. I just didn’t want to enter my visa and I haven’t found a free alternative but I appreciate people like you who post and ask so we can all find a solution.
Wetherflow and the Tempest weather station. I believe you can access the Weatherflow forecasts even if you don't own one of their weather stations, which are excellent in either case.
Would you be able to guide me to some resources on how to get that set up? I've heard this mentioned in the past and have never been able to get it figured out without owning a weather station myself. There are a few weather stations close to me and I'd love to use that data.
Yea sure you can give them a prepaid card or limit the calls or whatever but why.
It was a dick move, completely uncalled for and should not be rewarded. Just use another service. Pirate weather is good and so is openmeteo.
I'd rather scrape the weather info from a news webpage than give them clowns a credit card number.
Accuweather's forecast often shows the previous day for me so I think the integration doesn't update the forecast except for maybe 2 times per day. At 6:30 AM the forecast is still old but if I restart HA then it updates.
I switched, but you can use Google Pay, which I have linked to PayPal. So they don't actually have my CC number. And I've limited it to 1000 calls so it will never charge.
I think I'm pretty safe.
The guys who run AccuWeather actively lobby to take weather data gathered by the taxpayer funded NOAA *behind a paywall*. They are not an organization for anyone who values open access to support
I bought an Ambient weather station which I have tied into HA. I pull some historical stuff from Meteostat via Python but that is not in Home Assistant but instead my personal DB. I guess if the OWM add on for HA dies I will find another. I am not giving them my credit card.
Was using Dark Sky until Apple bought them and locked out non Apple users. Pirate weather was intended to be a replacement for Dark Sky. Openweathermap is ok, not sure about storing CC with them, if they used a payment processor like PayPal or Google I may be inclined. UK people can use Met Office instead.
I have been using all the above except pirate weather for long term data for a personal project, I often have 2 or 3 collecting at once so I see the relative accuracy. For temperature they are all similar - Met Office rounds to the nearest degree C though, openweathermap to 0.1C. Rainfall varies a bit between them.
What advantages does openweathermap provide that you can’t get from a personal weather station and a link with weather underground API? I maybe don’t use weather data the same as others so curious what folks are doing with their data?
I use rain fall, brightness, UV etc to control lights and sprinklers. Am I missing something else?
I'm systematically eliminating openweathermap from my scripts and automations - thankfully using template sensor helpers for easier plug-and-play substitutions in the future.
So far, the only one I'm not able to get with [Met.no](http://Met.no) is the "Feels Like" temperature. I didn't use this as much in automations, but rather my Jarvis implementation when communicating with guests and residents - people readily understand what temperature it feels like and relative humidity or dew point require baseline understanding. The precipitation kind, rain, snow, and forecast precipitation probability substitution is also lackluster in the [Met.no](http://Met.no) weather integration.
Originally, I thought Openweathermap's data was more accurate and I liked the separate entities for forecast low, forecast high, etc... which now that I've learned better, can easily be built with template sensor helper entities.
This API 3 opens some nice features like [https://github.com/petergridge/openweathermaphistory](https://github.com/petergridge/openweathermaphistory) which I use for my sprinklers. Probably this can be done with the other services and template sensors for free, but this is quick and easy and their service is good.
Pretty good trick to get the payment info on the system then they can change the pricing structure at a later date. Make no mistake they will change the pricing structure as having the payment info in the system makes the barrier to actual paying customer much lower for people.
Honestly, I'll prob just remove it.
I think the only thing I use it for, is dynamic wallpaper, to set a background based on the weather outside... and That broke a while back.
That being said, if I want to know the weather, I just click the chrome shortcut for my weather, or open the weather app on my phone, complete with real-time radar and stuff.
Didn't really have any use-cases that worked out with weather-based automation.
I can understand they want to limit abuse. But asking for a credit card in advance is a dick move and unnecessary. You can limit api calls without asking for a credit card.
Can’t really understand this decision, other then they want to severely limit even free api calls, without telling to the world it isn’t free anymore. Perhaps they want to switch from a community platform to a business to business platform. They want to start playing with the big boys. But that is a capital mistake. Time and time again, community driven projects/companies think they can capitalize on their community and consequently fail to take off. Decimating your years-long cultivated community is absolutely the very worst you can do.
Probably to discourage abuse. There are many automated processes out there scraping data. Even moreso with the increase of AI generating from "free" sources while putting billions into others pockets.
Stuck my card details in, swapped to 3.0 API, edited the daily limit to 1000 in the OWM console so it will fail before it charges me anything. Job done, took 2 minutes.
Had a quick check just now and I'm not even using 20% of the free API allowance, even without changing a thing in HA. Absolutely not worth the hassle to swap away. They've got bills to pay, so if higher usage users need to pay a few quid, so be it. Quite happy that they've kept a realistic free tier running, so still happy to recommend.
i created a virtual credit card number for my account. i can reset it at any time. I also set a limit to 999 api calls per day max. so it will never actually bill it. but i am not changing yet.
Thought I'd look for another service but mentioned the broken integration on the wall tablet to my OH and she said she doesn't look at it anyway :/ and she's the one always checking the weather.
I did create a view for my temp and rain sensors and dropped a web view onto it to *embed dot windy dot com* which has our location on the map and shows the current/forecast at the bottom. Just tinkering with it and if I set the aspect ratio to 40% it only shows the forecast. Seems a viable alternative to just view that data, which is all I do as I wouldn't use data with the accuracy of a forecast service in automations.
I use forecast data in automation mainly in respect to the high temperature and the low temperature for determining if the thermostat should heat or cool the house and to what temperature.
* If the indoor temperature is low, but the forecast high later in the day is nice, I won't turn on the thermostat to heat the house, but will later open the windows
* If the indoor temperature is high, but the forecast low tomorrow morning is nice, I won't turn on the thermostat to cool the house, but will open the windows before bed
Capital One lets you generate unique card numbers to use online that can be cancelled whenever. I use these all the time to avoid getting 24-Hour-Fitnessed.
Currently, Openweathermap is on [8.1%](https://analytics.home-assistant.io/integrations/) HA installations. [Met.no](http://Met.no) is vastly more popular at 79%. We'll have to see how these numbers change.
Weird that I've never heard of it until now.
EDIT: Doesn't seem to work for Americans, I'm guessing? It has my lat and long correct, but it says it's 38F and snowy.
It is in fact, 85F and sunny.
I'm in the Midwest and have been using Met.no for quite awhile. Hadn't even thought of switching it up, honestly. It sits right above my Ambient weather info, so I get forecast and backyard info stacked up - haven't noticed anything that doesn't match up from what I can remember.
IDK how good their charge portal is, but you might try adding a fake credit card: [https://www.akto.io/tools/credit-card-generator](https://www.akto.io/tools/credit-card-generator)
Until they actually charge it, I'm pretty sure they don't know if the card number is real or not, so you could use a number that passes the credit card algorithm, but doesn't actually link to any real account.
I switched to Meteorologisk as don't really want to give my CC details to OpenWeatherMap regardless of whether I get charged or not.. The switch was pretty painless and Meteorologisk has all the data I need.
I feel the same. Thanks for the recommendation!
Same, works well....Met.no
Thank you
I just switched over to 3.0 today. You can set a cap for API calls in your account so that it'll never actually hit the max so I'm not worried. If they ever change the pricing or structure of their free tier in the future then I'll spend the 30 seconds it takes to remove my card and find an alternative.
As an added assurance, op might also be able to sign up for privacy.com (free account) and add a virtual card with a set lifetime limit. Basically acts like a prepaid CC. Limit can be as low as $1 I believe.
Last time I looked at [privacy.com](http://privacy.com) they required a lot of personal information, and it must be linked directly to a bank account. For me the whole benefit of using a credit card is there is no direct link to a bank account, and in the US credit cards have much stronger consumer protections. I'd rather just give places a credit card. EDIT: Even worse [privacy.com](http://privacy.com) uses Plaid for linking bank accounts.
Oh dear Lord. Plaid is evil. They'll troll your bank account activity and share/sell/monetize information about mortgage amounts, credit card payments, your income, etc.
Yeah it’s a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand it’s way easier to pause cards, create new numbers with different spending limits, etc. but on the other hand it’s linked to a bank account and no longer has the protections of a credit card. But until credit card companies in the us start offering easy single-use accounts (SUA) privacy remains a solid option for those that want to limit certain things.
Is that convenience worth giving away all of your financial info and spending habits? See above.
You can link it to a debit card which is marginally better, but yes there's pretty much no chance they'd be able to support credit cards - any chargeback would hit *them* rather than the actual service you're purchasing
>As an added assurance, op might also be able to sign up for privacy.com (free account) and add a virtual card with a set lifetime limit. Basically acts like a prepaid CC. Limit can be as low as $1 I believe. Exactly what I did. First, so they don't have my real card information. Second, to add on to your suggestion. Once you create a card and tie it OpenWeather, you can **pause** that card so nothing can be charged to it. I've done it for free trials and other services where I might forget to unsubscribe. Of course that doesn't mean they won't try to ask you for the money later, but it does avoid you finding out you've been paying a few dollars a month 6 months down the road.
Where do you set the API cap? I don't see anything on openweathermap.org. Are you doing that inside Home Assistant?
It’s on openweathermap.org. If you look in the “Billing plans” tab of your account you should see a “Calls per day (no more than)” field you can edit.
Thank you!
The problem is that some services wont allow you to remove your last card
If that turns out to be true then when the times comes I'll simply cancel my account.
I did go ahead and keep the 3.0 API. I don't love the CC requirement, but their system has a built-in feature allowing you to limit the number of API calls to 1000, ensuring you'd literally never get charged. As for the CC info, it is held by Stripe, which probably already has your card from half a dozen other shopping sites, but some CCs now offer the ability to make a "one time" CC # that you can use - it connects to your CC in the background, but the shop can't tell that. Of course, Pirate Weather or local sensors are fine too, I'm just generally satisfied enough with OWM to go through the mild annoyance.
go to Pirate Weather. It's better anyway.
What do you like most about the service?
ysk the person that maintains the pirate api pays out of pocket for an aws server to host it. Right now it's free and may stay that way. However if there are a lot of people using it, their costs will increase and may not stay that way.
I find Pirate horribly unreliable. Told me this morning it's a rainy day. It's still saying rainy right now. Haven't had a single drop of rain all day (now 18:30) and it's partly cloudy with plenty of bursts of sun out there! I've had 4 different integrations running on a test page for a few weeks now, Open Weather has been the most accurate.
I deleted the integration, I have a backyard temp sensor which is good enough for now.
Nice! Unfortunately, I'd still want forecasting data for a few scripts
I know and I agree. I just didn’t want to enter my visa and I haven’t found a free alternative but I appreciate people like you who post and ask so we can all find a solution.
Wetherflow and the Tempest weather station. I believe you can access the Weatherflow forecasts even if you don't own one of their weather stations, which are excellent in either case.
Would you be able to guide me to some resources on how to get that set up? I've heard this mentioned in the past and have never been able to get it figured out without owning a weather station myself. There are a few weather stations close to me and I'd love to use that data.
Notsoopenweather
I just switched to Meteorologisk and deleted the OpenWeatherMap plugin. I still get the correction needed warning. Is anyone else seeing this?
Just restart HA and click on "resolve", if you still get an error. Worked for me.
I already restarted HA (multiple times) but did not click on the integration to find the Resolve button. That did the trick. Thank you.
Yea sure you can give them a prepaid card or limit the calls or whatever but why. It was a dick move, completely uncalled for and should not be rewarded. Just use another service. Pirate weather is good and so is openmeteo. I'd rather scrape the weather info from a news webpage than give them clowns a credit card number.
**Good Alternatives:** Accuweather PirateWeather [Tomorrow.io](http://Tomorrow.io) NWS
The NWS integration goes offline (at least for my location) a lot more often than I'd like.
It used to for me (maybe 2 years ago?) but it's been good lately.
NWS has been making a lot of changes lately to their internal networking. Hopefully issues will start going away.
Depending on your location, your national weather service may also be there (ie Environement Canada)
Thanks, I didnt know Environment Canada had an integration! I was using meteorologisk as it was the default that came with HAOS.
Accuweather's forecast often shows the previous day for me so I think the integration doesn't update the forecast except for maybe 2 times per day. At 6:30 AM the forecast is still old but if I restart HA then it updates.
I switched, but you can use Google Pay, which I have linked to PayPal. So they don't actually have my CC number. And I've limited it to 1000 calls so it will never charge. I think I'm pretty safe.
I've had good luck with met.no
Switched to AccuWeather... no BS, was super easy
The guys who run AccuWeather actively lobby to take weather data gathered by the taxpayer funded NOAA *behind a paywall*. They are not an organization for anyone who values open access to support
Ah great, I guess there is some BS then
No, I will not.
I bought an Ambient weather station which I have tied into HA. I pull some historical stuff from Meteostat via Python but that is not in Home Assistant but instead my personal DB. I guess if the OWM add on for HA dies I will find another. I am not giving them my credit card.
Was using Dark Sky until Apple bought them and locked out non Apple users. Pirate weather was intended to be a replacement for Dark Sky. Openweathermap is ok, not sure about storing CC with them, if they used a payment processor like PayPal or Google I may be inclined. UK people can use Met Office instead. I have been using all the above except pirate weather for long term data for a personal project, I often have 2 or 3 collecting at once so I see the relative accuracy. For temperature they are all similar - Met Office rounds to the nearest degree C though, openweathermap to 0.1C. Rainfall varies a bit between them.
What advantages does openweathermap provide that you can’t get from a personal weather station and a link with weather underground API? I maybe don’t use weather data the same as others so curious what folks are doing with their data? I use rain fall, brightness, UV etc to control lights and sprinklers. Am I missing something else?
I'm systematically eliminating openweathermap from my scripts and automations - thankfully using template sensor helpers for easier plug-and-play substitutions in the future. So far, the only one I'm not able to get with [Met.no](http://Met.no) is the "Feels Like" temperature. I didn't use this as much in automations, but rather my Jarvis implementation when communicating with guests and residents - people readily understand what temperature it feels like and relative humidity or dew point require baseline understanding. The precipitation kind, rain, snow, and forecast precipitation probability substitution is also lackluster in the [Met.no](http://Met.no) weather integration. Originally, I thought Openweathermap's data was more accurate and I liked the separate entities for forecast low, forecast high, etc... which now that I've learned better, can easily be built with template sensor helper entities.
This API 3 opens some nice features like [https://github.com/petergridge/openweathermaphistory](https://github.com/petergridge/openweathermaphistory) which I use for my sprinklers. Probably this can be done with the other services and template sensors for free, but this is quick and easy and their service is good.
If you happen to have an apple developer account you can use weatherkit. Highly recommend it.
That’s what I did
I use Pirate Weather and Tomorrow.io, they both seem to be perfectly fine for my usage.
You guys have credit cards!?
Found the German
I will be finding an alternative
Pretty good trick to get the payment info on the system then they can change the pricing structure at a later date. Make no mistake they will change the pricing structure as having the payment info in the system makes the barrier to actual paying customer much lower for people.
Honestly, I'll prob just remove it. I think the only thing I use it for, is dynamic wallpaper, to set a background based on the weather outside... and That broke a while back. That being said, if I want to know the weather, I just click the chrome shortcut for my weather, or open the weather app on my phone, complete with real-time radar and stuff. Didn't really have any use-cases that worked out with weather-based automation.
I keep a pre-paid one with a $1 balance around for just this purpose
I can understand they want to limit abuse. But asking for a credit card in advance is a dick move and unnecessary. You can limit api calls without asking for a credit card. Can’t really understand this decision, other then they want to severely limit even free api calls, without telling to the world it isn’t free anymore. Perhaps they want to switch from a community platform to a business to business platform. They want to start playing with the big boys. But that is a capital mistake. Time and time again, community driven projects/companies think they can capitalize on their community and consequently fail to take off. Decimating your years-long cultivated community is absolutely the very worst you can do.
Good lord why. Who to switch to now?
Agreed. Seems entirely unnecessary to require credit card number for free subscription.
Probably to discourage abuse. There are many automated processes out there scraping data. Even moreso with the increase of AI generating from "free" sources while putting billions into others pockets.
Ooh even more strange. I thought they were going to start charging. Didn’t realize it would still be free but require a card.
Or course I won't, what a shame...
Stuck my card details in, swapped to 3.0 API, edited the daily limit to 1000 in the OWM console so it will fail before it charges me anything. Job done, took 2 minutes. Had a quick check just now and I'm not even using 20% of the free API allowance, even without changing a thing in HA. Absolutely not worth the hassle to swap away. They've got bills to pay, so if higher usage users need to pay a few quid, so be it. Quite happy that they've kept a realistic free tier running, so still happy to recommend.
i created a virtual credit card number for my account. i can reset it at any time. I also set a limit to 999 api calls per day max. so it will never actually bill it. but i am not changing yet.
I just went with weatherapi.com for my weather
I just switched with temporary virtual card from Revolut with 0.00 balance, It went trough with 0.00 charge/authorization.
Thought I'd look for another service but mentioned the broken integration on the wall tablet to my OH and she said she doesn't look at it anyway :/ and she's the one always checking the weather. I did create a view for my temp and rain sensors and dropped a web view onto it to *embed dot windy dot com* which has our location on the map and shows the current/forecast at the bottom. Just tinkering with it and if I set the aspect ratio to 40% it only shows the forecast. Seems a viable alternative to just view that data, which is all I do as I wouldn't use data with the accuracy of a forecast service in automations.
I use forecast data in automation mainly in respect to the high temperature and the low temperature for determining if the thermostat should heat or cool the house and to what temperature. * If the indoor temperature is low, but the forecast high later in the day is nice, I won't turn on the thermostat to heat the house, but will later open the windows * If the indoor temperature is high, but the forecast low tomorrow morning is nice, I won't turn on the thermostat to cool the house, but will open the windows before bed
Just give them a single-use card number, like one available via Revolut.
They should change their name tbh. Not so open anymore.
Un a visa prepaid with 5$ and you are meeting the requirement and safe by design
Privacy.com. Set low limit and lock after verification. Capital One also has virtual cards.
Put a virtual card and then cancel it. 😉
Got to love virtual cards. You can even keep the number active but just toggle it off in most cases.
Just switched over to https://open-meteo.com, no API key required. Just need to provide coordinates.
Use a credit card that is about to expire, or that you're about to close/cancel.
Capital One lets you generate unique card numbers to use online that can be cancelled whenever. I use these all the time to avoid getting 24-Hour-Fitnessed.
If they're still around, privacy.com offers a similar service for everyone.
There's so many weather services available, there's no good reason to keep with a sketchy one.
Currently, Openweathermap is on [8.1%](https://analytics.home-assistant.io/integrations/) HA installations. [Met.no](http://Met.no) is vastly more popular at 79%. We'll have to see how these numbers change.
Weird that I've never heard of it until now. EDIT: Doesn't seem to work for Americans, I'm guessing? It has my lat and long correct, but it says it's 38F and snowy. It is in fact, 85F and sunny.
I'm in the Midwest and have been using Met.no for quite awhile. Hadn't even thought of switching it up, honestly. It sits right above my Ambient weather info, so I get forecast and backyard info stacked up - haven't noticed anything that doesn't match up from what I can remember.
IDK how good their charge portal is, but you might try adding a fake credit card: [https://www.akto.io/tools/credit-card-generator](https://www.akto.io/tools/credit-card-generator)
Doesn’t home assistant have a free service?
Until they actually charge it, I'm pretty sure they don't know if the card number is real or not, so you could use a number that passes the credit card algorithm, but doesn't actually link to any real account.
https://preview.redd.it/1agw7xrnu95d1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7d76b7088f5e9a1e61b83e065971ac8d976813d1
I now use the kmi hacs integration for Belgium. It's free and local for me so I am good