Visual Crossing Weather API
Visual Crossing Weather API
Visual Crossing Weather API provides global weather data — current conditions, 15-day forecast, 50 years of historical weather, by coordinates or address.
Free tier: 1000 requests/day — enough for small apps
Free tier prohibits commercial resale
Sign up for an API key. GET /VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline/{location}?key=... returns JSON. Location accepts city name, coordinates, or zip.
Uptime · 30-day window
About this API
Visual Crossing is a weather-data-focused company offering deeper historical data and a more generous free tier than OpenWeatherMap. Core data sources are NOAA, ECMWF, and other public meteorological agencies, plus their own cleaning and interpolation. The API is clean — a single timeline endpoint returns current observations + 15-day forecast + arbitrary historical dates in one request, avoiding multi-endpoint stitching for developers. Great for weather apps, logistics (truck routing by weather), insurance (catastrophe loss from historical weather), energy (wind/solar forecasting). vs. OpenWeatherMap: deeper history and more unified API; vs. Weather.com (IBM) enterprise API: much cheaper.
What you can build
- 1Display weather forecasts in apps
- 2Logistics/travel scheduling by weather
- 3Insurance risk assessment via historical data
- 4Agriculture irrigation decisions by forecast
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Free tier: 1000 requests/day — enough for small apps
- Deep historical data (50 years) for research and backtesting
- Single endpoint returns current + forecast + history — simplifies integration
Limitations
- Free tier prohibits commercial resale
- Sparse data in some remote regions
Example request
curl https://www.visualcrossing.com/weather-api/<endpoint>Getting started
Sign up for an API key. GET /VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline/{location}?key=... returns JSON. Location accepts city name, coordinates, or zip.
FAQ
Is the free tier enough for development?+
1000/day works for personal apps/prototypes. Production usually requires a paid plan (starting at $35/month).
How granular is historical data?+
Hourly granularity. 1970-present available for most of the world.
Is data accurate in China?+
Major-city data is accurate (sourced from WMO sharing). Rural precision lags domestic services.
Technical details
- Auth type
- unknown
- Pricing
- unknown
- Protocols
- REST
- SDKs
- python, javascript, typescript, go, java
- Response time
- 265 ms
- Last health check
- 5/12/2026, 7:38:35 AM