Consider lower-cost weather APIs

[tdulcet]

Is there a technical reason that a paid Rebble subscription is necessary to get the weather?

There are plenty of free weather APIs, including OpenWeatherMap and Yahoo Weather. OpenWeatherMap will even remove access limits for open source applications (see under "For FOSS developers").

The sun rise/set times can also be calculated directly with open source libraries, including SunCalc, MeeusJs and the Sun and moon rise/set project.

I created a simple webpage here to compare the output of these free weather APIs and sun rise/set libraries.

Would Rebble be open to providing the weather for free to all users? I would love to have the weather again in my timeline, but for me it is not worth $3 a month since I have the original Pebble Classic without dictation support or the weather app.

Edit: It seems that Rebble is paying up to $520,000 a year for IBM's Weather API!

[jwise]

The paid subscription, in part, pays for the cost of the "paid" services -- weather and dictation -- but it also goes to cover the cost of running the free services (AWS is expensive!), and the cost of maintaining the services. I definitely appreciate the pointers to lower-cost services, and I'll have a look at some point in the future -- but we think that $3/month is a great value that pays for weather, dictation, and keeping the Rebble project sustainable into the future! (Maciej Cegłowski wrote a nice tongue-in-cheek piece about this, too.)