What the Weatherbit API is and who it is for
Weatherbit.io operates its own weather data platform and surfaces it through a REST API that covers the most common weather data use cases: real-time conditions, short- and medium-range forecasts, and emergency alerting. The API is available through a freemium model, which makes it accessible for hobbyist projects and prototyping while offering paid tiers that scale up to production workloads.
Developers building travel apps, agriculture dashboards, energy-management tools, outdoor event planners, or any product that needs structured weather data will find the endpoint set practical and well-scoped. The free tier is narrow enough that you will hit it quickly in production, but it is generous enough to develop and test against without a credit card.
Endpoint walkthrough
The API exposes six endpoints under a clean, predictable URL structure.
GET /current
Returns real-time weather observations for a given location. This is the workhorse endpoint for anything that needs to show users what conditions look like right now — temperature, wind, humidity, cloud cover, and the associated Weatherbit weather codes and descriptions (documented separately at weatherbit.io/api/codes).
GET /forecast/minutely
Labeled as a "1 Hour / Minutely Forecast" or Nowcast, this endpoint is aimed at applications where minute-level precipitation timing matters — think run-tracking apps, drone flight planners, or hyperlocal agriculture tools. It covers the immediate hour ahead at per-minute resolution, which is a different data product from the multi-day forecasts below.
GET /forecast/hourly
Delivers a 120-hour (5-day) hourly forecast. This is the right endpoint when your users need to plan within the next few days and want hour-by-hour granularity rather than a single daily summary.
GET /forecast/daily
Covers up to 16 days out with one data point per day. This is the broadest time horizon the API offers and suits use cases like trip planning, long-range agricultural scheduling, or surfacing a two-week outlook to end users.
GET /alerts
Returns active severe weather alerts for a location. Integrating this endpoint alongside the forecast endpoints lets you build a complete weather experience that surfaces warnings — storms, floods, extreme heat — without polling a separate provider.
GET /forecast/3hourly
This endpoint is deprecated and returns a 5-day, 3-hourly forecast. It still exists in the API but should not be used in new integrations; the hourly endpoint covers the same time window at finer resolution.
Weatherbit also publishes metadata and icon image downloads at weatherbit.io/api/meta, which is useful if you want to display standardized weather icons that align with the API's condition codes rather than sourcing your own.
Pricing breakdown
The API uses a daily request quota model. All paid plans share the same overage rate of $0.0010 per request beyond the included quota.
| Plan | Price / month | Daily requests | Overage per request |
|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 | 25 | — |
| PRO | $19 | 2,500 | $0.0010 |
| ULTRA (recommended) | $39 | 10,000 | $0.0010 |
| MEGA | $195 | 100,000 | $0.0010 |
What the free tier realistically allows
Twenty-five requests per day is enough to build and manually test an integration, but not enough to run even a lightly used production app. If your app fetches current weather once per page load, 25 requests covers fewer than 25 unique user sessions per day. If you are polling on a schedule — say, refreshing conditions every 15 minutes for a single location — you exhaust the free quota in about six hours.
Plan for upgrading to at least PRO before any real user traffic hits the service.
Choosing between PRO, ULTRA, and MEGA
The ULTRA plan is flagged as recommended, and the math explains why: 10,000 daily requests at $39/month works out to roughly $0.0039 per request at the base rate, which is significantly cheaper per-call than PRO's $19 for 2,500 requests ($0.0076 per request). If you are anywhere near the PRO ceiling, ULTRA is the more economical choice.
MEGA at $195/month and 100,000 daily requests suits data-intensive backends — weather displays for many locations, batch jobs that pull forecasts across a geographic grid, or multi-tenant SaaS products where each tenant triggers independent queries.
Overage is available on all paid plans at $0.0010 per request, giving you a predictable cost model when traffic spikes without forcing an immediate plan upgrade.
Practical use cases
- Consumer weather apps: Combine /current, /forecast/daily, and /alerts into a complete mobile or web experience.
- Agriculture and outdoor operations: The minutely nowcast and 16-day daily forecast together let farmers and site managers plan around both immediate rain events and longer harvest windows.
- Travel and logistics: Hourly forecasts for origin and destination cities help apps surface weather-related delays or packing suggestions.
- IoT and smart-home devices: A low-frequency polling pattern (e.g., once per hour per device) means even a modest PRO plan can serve hundreds of devices.
- Energy management: Temperature and cloud-cover forecasts feed into heating/cooling load prediction models.
Limitations and things to check before integrating
Daily quota, not per-minute rate limiting: The documented constraint is daily request count, not a per-second or per-minute rate limit. That simplifies burst handling but means a runaway polling loop can exhaust your day's quota quickly — build in request caching at the application layer.
No historical data endpoint: The six listed endpoints are all forward-looking or real-time. If your use case requires historical weather records, this API does not cover that and you will need a supplementary source.
Deprecated endpoint in the lineup: The /forecast/3hourly endpoint is deprecated. Confirm that any third-party client libraries or code samples you find do not silently route to it.
Weather codes: Weatherbit uses its own condition code system (documented at weatherbit.io/api/codes). Map these to your UI labels and icons before launch; do not assume they correspond directly to codes from other providers.
Icon assets: Official icon images are available via weatherbit.io/api/meta. Using these ensures your UI stays consistent with the API's condition codes.
Getting started
The API is accessed through RapidAPI's marketplace. Subscribe to the BASIC plan (no cost) to receive an API key, then authenticate requests through RapidAPI's standard header mechanism. Point your first call at GET /current with a location parameter — the Weatherbit documentation at weatherbit.io/api describes the accepted location formats (coordinates, city name, postal code, and similar). Once you have a working response, explore the weather code reference and metadata pages to build out your UI layer before wiring up the forecast and alerts endpoints.
