API Trial suitable for home use?

tomung

I’m another long-term Premium user and a big fan of Windy and the excellent services your team provides.

I would like to kindly ask whether you would consider discussing the possibility of offering an API that could be integrated into Home Assistant and similar home automation platforms.

One example from my own setup would be using Windy forecast data to automatically close my curtains when sunny conditions are expected, combined with the sun’s elevation and azimuth at my location. This is just one of many potential Home Assistant use cases where reliable Windy data could add significant value.

I fully understand that implementing and maintaining such an API requires resources and careful consideration. However, given the strong interest reflected in this discussion thread—with more than 100 posts and over 89,000 views—I would be very grateful if you could at least consider the idea and discuss it internally with your development team.

As a loyal Premium subscriber, I would genuinely love to see this functionality become available in the future, and I believe many other users would benefit from it as well.

Thank you very much for your time, consideration, and the outstanding work you continue to do with Windy.

BR
Tom

Trev-61

I know that this chat has been going on a long time, but I too want add my interest in a home user API to be used in Home Assistant for the purpose of automation of my home.

trapdoor123

As another long-term Windy Premium subscriber that's about to set up Home Assistant and disappointed to find that there is no API access included at all with Premium, I just want to add my +1 to this idea. Personally I'd prefer 2 or 3 fixed locations, but could make 1 work for my main needs. Very low usage limits (e.g. 50 calls/day) would be fine and this would probably offset some or all of my app usage at the moment, so it would probably net out to no impact to your backend :)

Saicho

The ask, in one paragraph

Give active Premium subscribers a Point Forecast API key that returns real (unmodified) data, rate-limited to 500 requests per day, restricted to a small number of saved locations (2–3 is plenty), under a strict personal, non-commercial licence. Keep ECMWF excluded and keep every commercial use on the Professional plan, exactly as now. If free-with-Premium is a step too far, price it as a modest add-on — most of us would pay it without blinking.

Who is asking

Home users. Specifically the fast-growing overlap between Windy Premium subscribers and home-automation users (Home Assistant alone has well over a million active installations). We are not businesses. We want the forecast for one location — our own house — machine-readable, a handful of times a day.

A concrete, real example (mine): a heat pump that cools a stone-floored house through its underfloor heating. The control system reads tomorrow's maximum temperature to decide whether to pre-chill the floors overnight (cheap electricity, high heat-pump efficiency), and tomorrow's dew point to decide how cold the floors may safely go without condensation. That is eight API calls a day. It is currently impossible to do this with Windy at any price a household can justify.

Why the current options don't serve this need

Premium includes no API access at all.
The Trial key intentionally returns "randomly shuffled and slightly modified data" — unusable, by design, for any real automation.
Professional (€990/year, 10,000 req/day, unlimited models) is built and priced for businesses. A household needing 8 requests/day for one lat/lon is not its market, and never will be.

This gap is not new. The community has asked repeatedly over many years — see for instance:

Why this is good for Windy, not just for us

It sells Premium subscriptions. Today, a home-automation user gets nothing from Premium that their automation can use — so they wire up Open-Meteo.com or met.no, which give hourly temperature, humidity and dew point free, without keys. A Personal API makes Premium the obvious subscription for every Home Assistant user who already loves Windy's app. That is new recurring revenue from people you currently turn away.
It cannot cannibalise Professional. Personal licence, hard rate cap, 2–3 fixed locations, no ECMWF, no redistribution, key tied to an active Premium subscription. No business can run on that; every safeguard Professional's price defends is intact.
The infrastructure cost is already being paid. Trial keys are allowed 500 requests/day today — the servers already do this work, then scramble the result. Serving the true numbers to a paying subscriber costs the same compute as serving the corrupted ones to a free key.
Goodwill, in a community that has asked politely for years. The threads above span half a decade. Meeting a long-standing, reasonable request from paying subscribers is the cheapest marketing available.

Suggested shape (open to any variant)

Aspect-------Suggestion
Eligibility:-----Active Premium subscription
Data:---------Real, unmodified point-forecast data
Rate limit:-----500 requests/day (fewer would honestly suffice)
Locations:-----2–3 saved lat/lon pairs per key
Models:-------Standard set (iconEu, gfs, arome, …); ECMWF stays Professional-and-above
Licence:------Personal, non-commercial, no redistribution
Price:---------Included with Premium, or a small add-on (€xx/yr)

Any of these numbers can move. The essential points are only two: real data and a price a household can justify.

Mai65

Count me in as well. I’d really like to see a reasonably priced API option for personal/home use, especially for Home Assistant and other home-automation use cases.

There are already HACS integrations such as windy-home and windy-weather, which shows that there is genuine demand from the Home Assistant community.

I’d be perfectly happy with something limited to personal use for example, one location with a reasonable request limit. I don’t need anything close to the Professional API’d just like reliable Windy forecast data that I can use for automations at home.

So, another +1 from me. I’d happily pay a reasonable amount for this.

Fíla 2

+1 for personal free api:

suggestion limits (but FREE!):

24req/day
one point (location)
only Simple values asi wind, rain, temperture...