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:
- Basic API access with premium account
- API access for Windy Premium?
- API Trial suitable for home use?
- Pricing for personal use
- API possibilities for Home Assistant integration
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.