Side by side
| Running Cat Geo API | OpenWeather | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan, requests a month | 15,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Forecast on the free plan | hourly, 14 days | every 3 hours, 5 days |
| First paid plan, a month | $14.99 | $40 |
| Requests in it, a month | 150,000 | 10,000,000 |
| Forecast on it | hourly, 14 days | every 3 hours for 5 days, daily for 16 |
| Air quality | yes | yes |
| Pollen | yes, Europe | — |
| Weather along a route | every plan | Expert plan, $1,200 a month |
| River levels | yes | — |
| OpenStreetMap data, routing, heights | yes | — |
| Search by place name | — | yes |
| Weather history | — | Professional plan, $470 a month |
| Weather map tiles | — | every plan |
A dash means we found no such feature. OpenWeather also sells One Call API 4.0 by the call: the first 1,000 calls a day are free, then $0.0015 a call. Source: openweathermap.org/price.
Which one fits
If you show the current weather and a five-day outlook to many users and nothing else, OpenWeather's free plan gives more calls than ours. If you need weather history or ready weather map tiles, OpenWeather has them and we do not.
Running Cat Geo API fits apps that ask several things about the same place or route: the hourly forecast from ECMWF, NOAA, DWD and Canadian models, the weather at each point of a ride, air quality and pollen, river levels, heights, routes and OpenStreetMap data, on one key and one bill. GET /v1/point returns most of that for a place in a single request.