Visual Crossing
One-call weather API unifying 50+ years of history, current conditions and 15-day forecasts — JSON or CSV, priced per record.
About
Visual Crossing is a Reston, Virginia weather-data company built around one idea: a single Timeline API call should return everything — current conditions, the 15-day forecast, and historical records going back more than 50 years. That makes it popular with analysts and ML teams who otherwise stitch together separate forecast and history providers. The catalog covers about 100 elements: temperature, precipitation, wind, UV, solar and wind energy, soil temperature and moisture, evapotranspiration, degree days, maritime wave data, air quality, and even severe-event records like hail and tornado reports.
Pricing is the distinctive part: you are billed per weather 'record' — a full 15-day forecast counts as one record, while individual historical records count separately. The free tier gives 1,000 records/day for commercial and non-commercial use with attribution; Metered is $0.0001/record pay-as-you-go; Professional is $35/month; Corporate is $150/month. A newer Timeline LLX API offers ultra-low-latency queries for high-concurrency workloads.
What it can do
- Single-call Timeline API: history, current, forecast
- 50+ years of historical records
- ~100 weather elements incl. energy and agriculture
- JSON and CSV output
- Weather map tiles (radar, precipitation, lightning)
- Timeline LLX low-latency API
- Pay-per-record pricing with free 1,000/day
Setup
Sign up on visualcrossing.com, get a free API key, and hit the Timeline endpoint with a location and date range; the Query Builder composes queries without code.
Prerequisites
Free account for the free tier; no card required.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (TIER metrics, metrics-v1). Evidence: free-tier limits (1,000 records/day), Metered $0.0001/record and Professional $35/month pricing verified on the provider's own pages and a third-party API audit; 50+ year history and ~100 elements corroborated across sources. Strengths: genuinely generous free tier usable commercially, per-record pricing is simple for history-heavy work, CSV output is analyst-friendly. Docked for: (1) attribution required below Corporate tier; (2) per-record accounting can surprise on bulk history pulls; (3) smaller company than incumbents, so reliability guarantees are thinner; (4) no independent accuracy benchmarks published. License: proprietary; free 1,000 records/day, paid from $0.0001/record or $35/month.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Reston, Virginia weather-data company
- · Single-call Timeline API: 50+ year history + current + 15-day forecast
- · ~100 elements incl. energy, agriculture, severe events
- · Free tier 1,000 records/day usable commercially (attribution required)
- · Timeline LLX low-latency API in open beta
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.