Oleksii Schastlyvyi 7 mins read · August 06, 2025 After 10 years of building and maintaining Rain Viewer, I’ve made one of the most difficult decisions of my career: transitioning our API services to limited operation throughout 2025. As the founder who created this service to help developers worldwide visualize weather radar data, I understand the impact this has on your projects and businesses.Rain Viewer isn’t disappearing - we’ll continue providing radar data through our website and maintain our tiled map service for personal and educational use. But I recognize that many of you need robust, commercial-grade APIs for your applications. That’s why I’m writing this migration guide, drawing from my decade of experience in the weather radar API space to help you find the best alternatives.This isn’t a marketing piece or paid promotion. It’s my genuine attempt to help the developer community that has supported Rain Viewer over the years. I know each of these services, their apps, and their value propositions - I’ve been following them for a long time. We’ve definitely exchanged messages, had conversations, talked shop, used each other’s APIs, and dreamed about the future of weather radar with these teams. We’re all hooked at some point on the possibility of displaying weather radar data, so these aren’t “new horses” - they’re proven ones. Screenshots are made on same time from each service.1. Rainbow.ai (Rainbow Weather) - ML-Powered Forecasting NewcomerRainbow Weather stands out as a newcomer in the weather radar API space and the only similar option to what Rain Viewer does now: their API provides past and nowcast tiles from real weather radar images. Coverage is pretty similar (except China) to what Rain Viewer has now, so the migration will be simplified. Ironically, this is the first service that explicitly compares Rain Viewer vs. Rainbow Weather predictions on https://weatherindex.ai/ and states that they outperform us. I’m still a bit skeptical about all ML-b...
First seen: 2025-08-18 14:41
Last seen: 2025-08-18 19:42