What 23,876 Developers Said About Weather APIs

Developers talk about Weather APIs every day. Online on GitHub, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, home automation forums just to mention a few. They report bugs, ask for features and vent when something breaks in production.

Most of it is never sent to the company that could fix it.

We at Foreca wanted to learn more about how developers use weather data and APIs and in particular - what might make their blood pressure rise. With the help of AI, we went through 23,876 online public posts discussing weather APIs and categorized all our findings down to 34 themes.

Here's what developers told us, and what we're doing about it.

We expected requests for new features. Developers asked for trust.

To be honest, we expected to see a long feature wish list: New variables, new maps, new API endpoints. Indeed, those requests were there but the issues raised by most developers were much more fundamental.

 *Data based on 23,876 online posts discussing weather APIs, collected in September 2026.

Four of the top five aren't really features at all. They are about trusting the data, access to intuitive documentation or having a robust and reliable API. One developer found an elevation lookup returning data for a point 111 km away from the one requested. Another wrote: "As of a few minutes ago the API started returning an Internal Server Error for all requests." A third simply looked out the window: "It's actually sunny, +33°C, no hail or thunderstorms (the data said quite the opposite)."

We also noticed something else: More than 40% of all the questions posted never got an accepted or upvoted answer. That's 4 in 10. Developers are talking and asking for help, too often, nobody answers.

Listening without acting is just eavesdropping

Collecting feedback is the easy part. Most companies might do a survey, a feature request board or have a support inbox. The more difficult part is what happens next.

Our own developers already checked the rankings and evaluated what is genuinely hard to build and what we already have. Then the feasible findings will go into our roadmap planning where our product team, the people who build our API will hear what developers need, in their own words.

Some of the results also showed us an uncomfortable truth. Some things developers asked for, we already have: Confidence ranges for daily forecasts, unit and time zone options, a clean JSON structure. But if you can't find a feature, it doesn't exist for you.

What this means for you as our customer

• Trust comes before new features. Data quality and uptime are our first priority. You can follow our service health anytime at status.foreca.com.
• Docs that answer the question first. We're making parameters, code samples and license policies easier to find in our documentation, so you don't have to ask.
• We show up where you are. Our developers already answer questions for example on Reddit under their own names. We'll keep doing that.
• Ears are always open. This wasn't a one-off. We'll continue to listen and promise to deliver against what we learn.

Tell us what we missed

As you saw, developers are telling the industry what they need every day. Got a weather API pain we didn't catch? Please tell us and you'll get an answer from a real person, not a bot.

Talk to our team or start your free 30-day trial and see how our Weather API solves some of the raised issues for yourself.

Since 2014, Petri Marjava has helped businesses turn weather data into successful products, from road weather for automated driving to weather APIs for developers. He has led international weather businesses from Finland and Germany and currently works as Deputy Managing Director at Foreca, focusing on B2B growth. Connect with Petri on LinkedIn.