Pirate Weather vs Stormglass API

Pirate Weather

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

Stormglass API

A read-only weather and marine API with about 70 hourly parameters, per-source values from named national models, tide data and ERA5 history from 2014. No OpenAPI file, status page, SDK or security page was found, the free plan allows 10 requests a day, and the docs and FAQ disagree on the status code for a spent quota.

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

Stormglass API

1. Send the key as Authorization: KEY with no Bearer prefix. A missing or wrong key returns 403 with {"errors":{"key":"API key is invalid"}}
2. Always pass source=sg or a short source list on /weather/point. The default is every source, which multiplies the size of each hourly record
3. Treat 402 as a spent daily quota, not a billing failure, and stop until the next day. Read meta.requestCount against meta.dailyQuota on each response
4. Use /historical/point for past dates, at most 10 days a call and nothing newer than about 7 days. /weather/point looks back 14 days only
5. Send and read all times in UTC. Tide sea levels are relative to the chosen datum (MSL by default) and are not water depth