Country subscriptions vs one API key: why TopMeteo and Convek answer different questions

TopMeteo is one of the most established European soaring forecast services, with strong adoption across France, Germany, Spain, Italy and beyond. It is a pilot-facing product, shipped country by country, with subscriptions and licensing handled regionally. The model is mature, the maps are good, the cross-country planning tools are well thought out. If you fly in continental Europe and you want a polished pilot-facing forecast UI across several countries, TopMeteo is on the shortlist for good reason.

What I want to talk about is the structural difference - because it shapes what each product can and cannot do, downstream.

TopMeteo's commercial model is built around regional subscriptions. You pick a region (France, Germany, Alps, etc.) and pay for that region; you can also buy a wider Europe subscription that bundles all of them, if you fly across many countries. Either way, the unit of pricing and licensing is regional. The model has worked well for them - it matches how soaring associations are organised, it matches how regional gliding magazines sell subscriptions, and it lets each region be tuned to local needs (Alpine vs flatland, paragliding vs gliding emphasis, language).

That is a perfectly sensible shape for a pilot product. It does not work for a developer product. If you are building a paragliding app that you want to ship globally, the last thing you want is to wire up seven country licenses with seven sets of credentials and seven billing relationships. You want one API key that returns the same JSON shape for whatever lat/lon you query. The contract has to be uniform, the auth has to be central, and the pricing has to scale on something like 'requests per day', not 'countries you are licensed for'.

That is the shape Convek takes. One API key. One JSON contract. Same field names whether you query a UK XC site or an Alpine ridge. We add a country by extending the rectangle we run WRF over - the response shape does not change, the auth does not change, the billing does not change. From a developer's point of view, expanding into a new country is a single new `region=de` request, not a license negotiation.

The trade-off is honest. TopMeteo's country-by-country approach lets them tune each region in ways a single uniform API never quite can - language, units, local convention, regional partner integrations. Convek's uniform approach lets a single app cover six countries with the same code, but it gives up the per-country polish. If you are a pilot wanting a forecast for one country, the trade is against you; if you are a developer wanting to ship one product across many regions, the trade is for you.

Where the comparison gets interesting is what is missing on both sides. Neither product has a free tier you can actually build on - TopMeteo has trial subscriptions, Convek has 25 queries/day production-allowed. Neither has been the obvious answer for clubs wanting to run a website widget - TopMeteo because the integration is not the focus, Convek because the club toolkit is currently enquiry-led rather than a mature self-serve product. Both have work to do there. The comparison page lays out the field-by-field detail.

If you are a pilot in Europe looking for a soaring forecast UI, TopMeteo is a strong answer and one of the products I would point a non-coder friend at. If you are a developer trying to ship a soaring tool across multiple countries with one codebase and one billing relationship, that is the gap a uniform API is built to fill.