Convek vs Open-Meteo
A clean comparison for pilots and developers evaluating soaring weather options.
Open-Meteo is genuinely great. It's free for non-commercial use, open-source, dev-friendly, and already powers a lot of pilot tools - Meteo-Fly, FlyDecision and others build on it. It also exposes the stability fields a soaring app needs - CAPE, Lifted Index, PBL height. If you're starting a hobby project, you should probably use Open-Meteo. Convek exists for the gap above that: native RASP fields from a soaring-specific WRF run, with commercial redistribution and an SLA.
What Convek is
Convek is a paid, SLA-backed REST API serving native RASP-style soaring fields - wstar, BL height, BL top, soaring ceiling, cloudbase, convergence - from a WRF model we run ourselves 4x daily on GFS, downscaled to 4 km for specific soaring regions. Commercial redistribution is built into the paid tiers.
What Open-Meteo is
Open-Meteo is an open-source weather API that re-serves multiple global and regional NWP models (GFS, ICON, MET Norway and others) through a uniform interface. It's free for non-commercial use up to 10,000 calls/day, with paid plans for commercial volume. It does not run its own soaring-specific model, but it does expose generic stability fields (CAPE, Lifted Index, PBL height) from upstream NWP.
Facts here were accurate at time of writing. If something is out of date or wrong, please let us know.
Which should you pick?
Pick Convek if
You need soaring-tuned fields like wstar and BL top from a dedicated soaring model, with redistribution rights and uptime guarantees.
Pick Open-Meteo if
You're building a non-commercial pilot tool and can work with generic NWP stability indices and a derived approximation of thermal strength.
In short
For a hobby paragliding app on a personal site, Open-Meteo is the obvious starting point and we'd recommend it. For a commercial product, an instrument, or a club display that needs soaring-tuned fields like wstar and BL top from a dedicated soaring model - not generic stability indices from a global NWP - that's where Convek fits.