Topic: [End of Service] Weather Underground API

[dnavarrojr]

Received this email:

The WU API has been around since 2010 to help you develop apps and websites as well as manage your Personal Weather Station data. During that time, we've watched you build amazing products and visualize weather data with creativity and purpose.

Over the years, our infrastructure has been unable to keep up with the growing numbers of users coming to us for API data. This has led to higher costs as we worked to keep the service stable and dependable. Eventually, we realized we'd need to make drastic changes or risk serious problems for our API.

As a result, we've made the difficult decision to retire the Weather Underground API. The Weather Company, which acquired WU back in 2012, offers a powerful suite of enterprise-grade APIs that might be better suited to meet your scale and performance needs while offering a broader range of weather data. You can see these products here (http://biz.weather.com/WU-Data-API_Data-Package-Demo-Request.html).

Here's what you need to know going forward:

    Your subscriptions, and therefore access, will continue to work through 12/31/2018 .
    If you are a paying WU API customer , you will receive a call from a representative from The Weather Company, and IBM business, to discuss transition options to other API services. If you'd like to have these conversations sooner, contact us .
    If you are a Personal Weather Station owner , you will receive more information about our plan to offer free access to the data you provide to Weather Underground. We'll reach out once that plan has been finalized.
    For developers who use WU API data for non-commercial purposes , you will have access to a new plan for a personal use, low call volume API. Stay tuned for more details as we build this out.
    The WU Forum will continue to be the best place to connect, keep you informed, share your feedback and get your questions answered as we go through this process.

We are grateful for your commitment to Weather Underground and appreciate your understanding and support as we work through this process. These changes will allow us to continually improve our services and develop new features to keep WU a thriving place for you for many years to come.

Thanks for being part of the community!
Sincerely,
The WU Team

[dnavarrojr]

60 days is not a lot of time to rebuild code.

[Jáchym]

Rebuild the code.... thats IMHO not the issue, the question is, how are you going to rebuild it if there is no longer free access. I doubt they would offer complete free access to all your data like now.

[ValentineWeather]

I don't use any of their API services I can think of. I know the Saratoga scripts has options to use a few items like radar and satellite but I built my website around them originally. Now if NOAA/NWS removed their API services I would be in trouble.

[weatherc]

    If you are a Personal Weather Station owner , you will receive more information about our plan to offer free access to the data you provide to Weather Underground. We'll reach out once that plan has been finalized.
    For developers who use WU API data for non-commercial purposes , you will have access to a new plan for a personal use, low call volume API. Stay tuned for more details as we build this out.

Wild guess, as station-owner may dl data manually for free while automaitic like scripts for a truck of dollars.

[galfert]

Rebuild the code.... thats IMHO not the issue, the question is, how are you going to rebuild it if there is no longer free access. I doubt they would offer complete free access to all your data like now.

Well the email says that they will offer some kind of free access for personal station owners at some point. Hopefully it will be complete data and just perhaps be only limited only by some bandwidth constraints (number of API access requests per given time frame). So perhaps all the data will be available but the software using it may have to be written to not abuse the amount of requests that they set.

Can't hurt at this point to be optimistic....as hopefully WU is watching what we say and taking note and ensuring that WU continues to be the best it can be for everyone.

From the email:

If you are a Personal Weather Station owner , you will receive more information about our plan to offer free access to the data you provide to Weather Underground. We'll reach out once that plan has been finalized.

[ValentineWeather]

Rebuild the code.... thats IMHO not the issue, the question is, how are you going to rebuild it if there is no longer free access. I doubt they would offer complete free access to all your data like now.

Well the email says that they will offer some kind of free access for personal station owners at some point. Hopefully it will be complete data and just perhaps be only limited only by some bandwidth constraints (number of API access requests per given time frame). So perhaps all the data will be available but the software using it may have to be written to not abuse the amount of requests that they set.

Can't hurt at this point to be optimistic....as hopefully WU is watching what we say and taking note and ensuring that WU continues to be the best it can be for everyone.

From the email:

If you are a Personal Weather Station owner , you will receive more information about our plan to offer free access to the data you provide to Weather Underground. We'll reach out once that plan has been finalized.

Yeah if WU screws their base won't end good for sure IMO. Reason they are even around are weather enthusiasts with PWS. That’s how it all got started. 

[Jáchym]

"hopefully WU is watching what we say and taking note and ensuring that WU continues to be the best it can be for everyone."

in this case I am 100% sure they dont. Just look at how they react/reply when their services are down.... No, the only thing they care about is profit, not users. And keep in mind one thing - "we", the PWS owners who really care, have our own websites etc., are maybe 0.5% of the overall number of users. The remaining 99,5% are people who bought a PWS, which can send data to WU, which they maybe dont even know it does and if they do, they just look at the website once a yr, having no clue what "api" is.

[openvista]

Good to hear from you again, Jachym. I've been missing your informed perspective.

As for me, I pulled their API data off my site last spring when they first announced that they would no longer issue free API keys. I knew it would come to this. It's been clear for awhile they no longer know how to create and can barely even fix, but they sure know how to tear down!

No, galfert, there isn't a reason to be optimistic with WU. Years of them fumbling in the dark and whacking at things indiscriminately regardless of the consequences argues to the contrary. When they "fix" things, they often don't stay fixed and then, just as mysteriously, things that were working suddenly break. I'm growing weary of the oft-repeated announcement "but this time is different!" No, it's not. The big picture hasn't changed. 

WU cares about the data coming IN, not the data going back out to their contributors or consumers. And, no, they don't have to maintain a minimum level of service to keep the uploads flowing. For everyone who leaves many more arrive. We are in the midst of a "smart" device boom that includes all manner of connected weather doodads that send data most often exclusively to WU. In other words, they are locked in. So unless "owners" (licensees) want an expensive brick or a weather station that only they can enjoy on a private cloud, they'll have to accept whatever level of service or disservice WU provides. That's how a monopoly works. No one is even remotely close to threatening them.

[galfert]

Openvista,
Good points, good reasoning. I said I was optimistic because it matters to me for the outcome to improve. But you paint a good picture, and I agree somewhat. I think it is more like we are at a tipping point. I think it could go either way.

The current monopoly situation does tip the scale over to complacency, and things may continue to not work and fixes delayed. But all it takes is a Google or Amazon or Microsoft to one day challenge Weather Underground.

Or what if Davis, Chaney (Acurite) and Ambient formed a consortium and they all agreed to update their hardware to all report to some new universal service that properly ranks and quality controls  stations by sensor health analysis, gives the public access with a modern website, mobile apps, and reasonable API pricing for IoT device manufacturers. If that happened then goodbye Weather Underground.

We have universal standard interconnected email. It doesn't matter who your ISP is or what service provides you email. Why should weather data be different? Remember the late 80s and 90s with Prodigy, AOL, CompuServ. They all offered email, nobody was interconnected, there was no global standard. They were email islands that only emailed within that service. Corporations were the same way with private internal only email like Microsoft Mail (before Exchange) , Novell Groupwise, and Unix/Vax solutions. I think it's time weather data be freed from the constraints of individual weather services.

[dnavarrojr]

For myself, I just created a WU compatible REST call on my server that uses the NWS API instead.  However, I'm going to miss a lot of the other data, such as historical and their more readable alert information.

It appears the API documentation is no longer available...

[openvista]

I think it's time weather data be freed from the constraints of individual weather services.

Agreed, but who is going to challenge WU's 10-15 year lead in intellectual property, user base, infrastructure, capital, etc? Surely not the combined weight of the relatively small companies you mentioned.

Just look how long it's taken Davis to build out WeatherLink 2.0. They are "only" dealing in observation data not forecasts/alerts/webcams/radar/etc.

Creating & managing a high-volume, scalable API with rich, discrete data types is a pipe dream for mom & pop shops. That's why they sell out to the IBMs of the world who reduce the company to about 2% fat. To do that, they have to politely tell all but the biggest stakeholders to f**k off. If this were a farm, the weather station owners would be the cows. How well do most farms treat their cows? Either way, the milk comes out and the milk gets sold. Now you understand WU's business model, the same model any other Big Cloud Company would use to manage a similar amount of data.

[Jáchym]

Accuweather
Google Maps
Weather Underground
WeatherLink
etc.

not so optimistic trend...