# Pirate Weather vs WeatherAPI.com

> Pirate Weather has a score of 66.2 (B) against WeatherAPI.com's 65.8 (B). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 35 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pirate-weather-vs-weatherapi-com
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pirate-weather-vs-weatherapi-com.md (~1,550 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pirate-weather-vs-weatherapi-com.min.md (~330 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pirate-weather-vs-weatherapi-com.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-05

Pirate Weather has a score of 66.2 (B) against WeatherAPI.com's 65.8 (B). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 35 points.

- Pirate Weather: grade B, 66.2/100, rank #162 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pirate-weather.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/pirate-weather.json
- WeatherAPI.com: grade B, 65.8/100, rank #169 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/weatherapi-com.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/weatherapi-com.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Pirate Weather for security & auth (+8), maintenance & community (+35).

Pick WeatherAPI.com for reliability (+15).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Pirate Weather | WeatherAPI.com | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 75 | 90 | WeatherAPI.com +15 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 85 | 89 | WeatherAPI.com +4 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 77 | 80 | WeatherAPI.com +3 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 45 | 37 | Pirate Weather +8 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 30 | 30 | even |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 80 | 45 | Pirate Weather +35 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 71 | 70 | Pirate Weather +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **66.2 · B** | **65.8 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Pirate Weather | WeatherAPI.com |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Pirate Weather | WeatherAPI.com (Zoomash Ltd) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.pirateweather.net/forecast` | `https://api.weatherapi.com/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (docs and spec), AGPL-3.0 (API code) | none |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-23 | none |
| Popularity | 907 stars | none |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | 3.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

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

**WeatherAPI.com.** 3 million calls for $7 a month, and 100,000 a month free with no card. Key only in the query string, and no security.txt.

## Before you call either

### 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

### WeatherAPI.com

1. Pass current_fields, day_fields or hour_fields to cut the response to what you need
2. Treat a 403 with error code 2007 as the monthly quota, not a bad key. There's no 429
3. Reuse the id from search.json (q=id:NNN) to avoid ambiguous city names
4. Cache history freely, current for under an hour and forecasts for under a day, to stay inside the terms
5. Use https://api.weatherapi.com/v1. The docs still show an http:// base URL

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