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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

Dark Sky was never free for unlimited use.

It’s now Apple’s WeatherKit.

The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year Apple Developer account and there is a standard REST API for none Apple OS’s.

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> The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year[...]

They may be included with your $99/year subscription, but to call them "free" is like saying that the groceries I'm holding are free because I just gave the cashier money.

I would say it's more like saying that driving on the highway is free because you pay taxes. I doubt anyone is buying a developer account specifically for weather API calls.

Lots of people drive on highways who pay no highway taxes, foreign tourists for example.

It's free like riding the monorail at Disney World is free; included in the cost of your entry ticket, and utterly inaccessible to anyone who has not paid.

Lots of people get the weather forecasts from tv or radio for free. Weather forecasts aren't "utterly inaccessible" the way the Disney monorail is.

Not from the Dark Sky API they don't.

We're not talking about "weather forecasts", we're talking about a specific set of weather forecasts accessed in a particular way.

> Lots of people drive on highways who pay no highway taxes, foreign tourists for example.

Highways are mostly funded through gas taxes, and registration fees for EVs. Even foreign tourists buy gasoline, or drive an EV that paid its registration fee.

Also, the Disney World monorail is outside the ticket gates. You can ride it without a ticket.

OK fine pick some random thing that's "free" within the ticket gates but isn't what people go there for.

Foreign tourists very much pay for driving on the highways on the way to Disney World through higher sales taxes, tolls, hotel taxes etc. There is a reason that Florida is state tax free.

Source: I live 30 minutes away from Disney and partially moved to Florida when I started working remotely to save money on taxes.

I feel its not nearly as useful as the old darksky api. The secret sauce of that software was that it combined typical weather data with local reports. Afaik there is no way to submit a weather report on the apple weather app. They bought it for the name and to kill a competing option essentially vs attempting to use what made that app actually compelling compared to other weather apps.

There actually is.

At the bottom - report an issue.

If you scroll down on to the bottom of Apple Weather it has a “Report an Issue” button which allows you to report current weather conditions at your location.

I have no idea what happens to that data and if it contributes to the report in any way.

Wow I would have assumed that was to report a bug not a weather call. Darksky had a great ui for quickly reporting the weather and encouraged it as the primary feature of the app.

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