New Weather Service Integration Options Needed (too expensive!)

I was excited to find this theme has weather widget (like so many other themes), and a free account from “OpenWeather” sounded nice for a green field business or solo developer…

But then I checked their actual service prices, and it seems they are on the most expensive tier of weather services – and this is the only service you provide integration with?

Only 1000 request free per day. Dev subscription costs a whopping 160 euros a month! “Startup” subscription would costs hefty 35 euros a month, while not even providing hourly forecasts.

The previous premium theme I was using had several options available.

During a development day it’s entirely possible I’d be loading the page over a thousand times… They would charge 0.14 cents per each call over 1k calls per day. Plus this site actually reaches 1k loads a day.

Well, maybe your widget already does caching where a page load would not necessarily equate an API call, but my point is that the paid tiers of OpenWeather API are on the more expensive end of the spectrum.

In comparison Weather API has a million calls a month as it’s starting free tier. It’s first paid level is Starter with 3M calls a month at just $75 per year, in comparison to $35 per month as OpenWeather’s first paid level.

The most popular free widget Location Weather has integrations to both Weather API and OpenWeather API, but offers most of the visual configuration options in paid Pro version.

PS. Your widget does look good by default. It would be nice to be a bit more robust especially in terms of integration options. Your competitor JNews’s widget which I previously used offers, was it, 4 integration options out of the box.