Weather Website Pricing in 2026: Pro Weather vs the Alternatives

Pricing pages for weather services are unusually hard to compare, because almost none of them are selling the same thing. One charges per device, another per station website, a third is free but keeps your data for twelve months, and the "free" self-hosted option quietly bills you in hardware and evenings.

This post puts the real 2026 numbers side by side: what each service charges, what you get for it, and what three years actually costs. Every price below was checked against the vendor's own page on 2 August 2026, with links so you can verify each one yourself.

Disclosure: Pro Weather publishes this comparison and is one of the options in it. That is a conflict of interest, so the numbers are sourced and linked, and the sections on where the alternatives are cheaper are written as plainly as the rest.

What does a weather station website cost in 2026?

The realistic range is €0 to about €180 per year. Free community pages cost nothing and give you a page on someone else's domain. Dedicated station-website services cluster between €59 and €120 per year. Per-device dashboard plans reach €180/year for a single station on a top tier, and self-hosting trades the subscription for hardware and time.

Here is the field, with prices as listed by each vendor in August 2026.

Sources: Weathercloud plans, AWEKAS Stationsweb, Weatherstage, Davis WeatherLink plans, all retrieved 2 August 2026. Prices exclude tax where the vendor states tax is added at checkout.

What does "free" actually buy?

Free tiers are genuinely free and genuinely useful, and they all stop at the same place: the page is not yours. Weather Underground, PWSWeather, ProWeatherLive, and WeatherLink Basic all publish your live data at no cost, on their layout, at their address, under their retention policy.

That is the right answer for a lot of people. If you check your own conditions on a phone and occasionally send someone a link, paying for anything is a waste. The ProWeatherLive app does that job well, and so does the free WeatherLink dashboard.

The limits show up when you want something the free page is not trying to be:

• An address you control. A free page lives at a URL with someone else's brand in it, and it moves when they redesign.
• A design that is yours. Layout, colours, logo, and any advertising are set by the host.
• History that does not roll off. WeatherLink Basic keeps recent data only. Weathercloud's free Basic tier keeps twelve months. Neither is a permanent archive.
• More than a few devices. Weathercloud Basic caps at three devices; beyond that the free tier stops applying.

Weatherstage is the interesting case here, because its free tier does give you a hosted dashboard on your own subdomain at $0, updating every ten minutes. If a branded page on a shared domain is enough, that is a real option and it costs nothing. Its paid tier is where the comparison tightens: $10/month buys the custom domain, five-minute updates, and one month of history.

Why per-device pricing changes the maths

Most weather platforms charge per device or per station. Pro Weather charges per site, and one site can carry several stations under one subscription. That difference is invisible with one station and decisive with three.

Weathercloud states its paid plans as a per-month price per device, billed annually: €3/device for Plus, €5/device for Pro, €15/device for Premium (Weathercloud, retrieved 2 August 2026). Davis sells WeatherLink Pro per device too, which is why a second Davis station means a second Pro subscription rather than a bigger one. AWEKAS Stationsweb is licensed against an AWEKAS station ID.

So the annual cost for someone running three sensors' worth of hardware looks like this:

At one station the three are within a few euros of each other. At three they are not close, and the reason is the billing unit, not the feature list. This matters most for the people who tend to have several stations: clubs, schools, farms, and anyone who added a second site after the first one worked. That is also why the club and school setup is priced the same as a single-station hobby site.

What Pro Weather charges, and what is in it

Pro Weather is €5.99 per month or €59 per year per site, after a 14-day free trial that does not ask for a card. The annual price works out to €4.92 per month, so paying yearly saves about €13 a year.

One subscription covers the whole site: a custom domain with automatic SSL (or a free yours.pro-weather.com subdomain), your branding and layout, permanent history, the wind rose and records archive, severe-weather warnings from the NWS and MeteoAlarm, email alerts, eleven display languages, and republishing to Weather Underground, CWOP, Windy, AWEKAS, Weathercloud, and others. Multiple stations on one site are included.

There is no cheaper tier, which is worth stating plainly: if you want a €2/month version with fewer features, Pro Weather does not sell one. The bet is that a weather site with a five-year gap in its archive is not worth much, so history and the domain are not upsell material.

A custom domain is the one cost that sits outside the subscription. Registrars charge roughly €10-15 a year for a .com, and that applies to every option in this article that supports a custom domain at all, including self-hosting.

The self-hosted option: free software, real costs

WeeWX and CumulusMX cost nothing to download and are, in cash terms, the cheapest way to own everything. The cost lands somewhere else. A Raspberry Pi with a case, power supply, and card runs about €80-120 up front, electricity adds roughly €10-35 a year, and shared web hosting to serve the generated pages runs €36-120 a year.

The full accounting is in the hidden costs of running your own weather server, but the headline is that time dominates: setup plus maintenance realistically takes 15-30 hours a year, and SD cards are a consumable under continuous logging.

None of that makes self-hosting a bad choice. It makes it a different choice. People who enjoy the server as a hobby get something no subscription provides: total control, arbitrary customisation, and a local copy of everything. The comparisons in Pro Weather vs WeeWX and Pro Weather vs CumulusMX go through that trade in detail, and both are honest about where the free software wins.

Three years of ownership, side by side

Subscription prices are easiest to judge over a term long enough for the setup costs to matter. Over three years, with a custom domain included where the option supports one:

The AWEKAS three-year licence is the cheapest paid route to a station website with a domain, if the standard AWEKAS layout and feature set fit what you want. AWEKAS sells non-recurring licences with volume discounts of 10% for two years and 20% for three or more (AWEKAS, retrieved 2 August 2026), which is unusual and genuinely good value. What you are choosing between at that point is price against how much the site looks and behaves like yours.

Self-hosting is the widest range because it depends entirely on what hardware you already own. If a Pi is already running in your house for other reasons, the marginal cost drops to hosting and time, and it becomes the cheapest option on this table. If you are buying everything new, it is the most expensive.

Which one is cheapest for what you actually want?

Cheapest depends on the requirement, so work out the requirement first. Four common ones, and the honest answer for each:

• "I want to see my own data." Free. WeatherLink Basic, ProWeatherLive, or the Weather Underground page. Do not pay for this.
• "I want my Davis history back." WeatherLink Pro, at about $3.95/month per device. It is the cheapest way to unlock your own archive, and what each WeatherLink tier includes covers the catches. A website product is a poor substitute if history is the only thing you want.
• "I want a public site that looks like mine." This is where the paid services separate. Compare AWEKAS Stationsweb, Weatherstage Pro, and Pro Weather on design control, domain, and archive rather than on price, because they land within about €60 a year of each other.
• "I want to own the whole stack." Self-host. Pay in hardware and hours rather than subscription, and read the cost breakdown before starting so the number is not a surprise.

There is a fifth case worth naming: several of these can run at once, and often should. Your station can upload to Weather Underground, CWOP, and Weathercloud while a paid site serves as the public front door. Nothing has to be switched off to try an alternative, which is why the 14-day Pro Weather trial runs alongside whatever you use today rather than replacing it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Pro Weather cheaper than Weathercloud?

At one device they are close: Weathercloud Pro is €5/month per device billed annually (€60/year), against €59/year for Pro Weather. From the second device onward Pro Weather is cheaper, because it bills per site and Weathercloud bills per device. They are also not the same product. Weathercloud is a dashboard on a shared network; Pro Weather is a website on your own domain.

What is the cheapest way to put a weather station online?

Free, via a community network like Weather Underground, PWSWeather, or CWOP, or the free dashboard bundled with your hardware. Those cost nothing and take minutes. The cheapest way to get a site of your own is either a multi-year AWEKAS Stationsweb licence or self-hosting on hardware you already own.

Do these services charge per station or per website?

Both models exist, and it is the single biggest cost difference between them. Weathercloud, WeatherLink, and AWEKAS price per device or station. Pro Weather prices per site, and a site can include several stations on one subscription.

Does Pro Weather need a paid WeatherLink subscription?

No. Pro Weather reads your data through a free WeatherLink v2 API key and works on the free Basic plan. A paid WeatherLink Pro term matters only if you want your past archive imported, since historic API access is a Pro feature. Connect while Pro is active, and the imported history stays in your Pro Weather archive afterwards.

Are there hidden costs on top of the subscription?

A domain name, at roughly €10-15 a year, if you want a custom one, and that applies to every option here that supports custom domains. Tax may be added at checkout depending on where you are. Pro Weather includes SSL, hosting, and storage in the subscription price, so there is no metered bill for observations or traffic.

The short version

There is no single cheapest option, only a cheapest option per requirement. Free tiers genuinely cover people who just want to see their readings. WeatherLink Pro is the cheapest fix for missing Davis history. Among the services that give you an actual website, prices sit close enough together that the deciding factor is what the site does, not what it costs, with the exception of multi-station setups, where per-device billing changes the answer.

Pro Weather is €5.99/month or €59/year per site, permanent history included, with a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card. If you want to see the wider set of trade-offs before spending anything, the full comparison index covers each alternative in detail, and best weather website hosting platforms covers the question of where a site should live.