Meteomatics Weather API vs Pirate Weather

Meteomatics Weather API

A public OpenAPI file, a hosted MCP server whose nine tools are all marked read-only, a published SLA with compensation and ISO 27001 certification suit company use. Access needs a sales contract, with no public price, free tier or self-serve signup found, no status page, and REST calls that authenticate with a username and password.

Pirate Weather

Named model sources and a documented priority order for every field. No SLA, and the terms call it best effort.

Meteomatics Weather API

1. Ask the account owner for credentials first. There is no signup, and both the REST API and the MCP server need a Meteomatics account with API access
2. Build REST URLs as validdatetime/parameters/location/format, for example 2026-10-08T00:00:00Z/t_2m:C/52.52,13.40/json. Parameter names carry their unit after a colon
3. Keep each query to 10 locations and 10 parameters unless the contract says otherwise, and use POST when a GET URL passes 2,000 characters
4. Send credentials or the token in the Authorization header. Avoid the documented access_token query parameter, which puts the token in URLs and logs
5. Read /user_stats_json before a large job. It reports queries sent and the contract's limits, and 429 means a limit is spent
6. Treat reserved values such as -888 and -999 as invalid or missing data, and shrink the request when a 408 arrives after the 300-second timeout

Pirate Weather

1. Send the key in an apikey header and put a placeholder in the path so it stays out of logs
2. Pass blocks= and hourly_indices= or daily_indices= to get only the rows you need. The default payload is large
3. Ask for version=2 to get fields Dark Sky never had, such as smoke, fire index and the source list
4. Point historical requests at timemachine.pirateweather.net with a UNIX timestamp after the coordinate
5. Watch Ratelimit-Remaining. The cap is monthly, so a runaway loop can spend it in a day