Data APIs — Open-Meteo (weather) + Alpha Vantage (finance)

decision Sat Jun 20 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) decisionsarchitecturedata-apiweatherfinanceopen-meteoalpha-vantage

Data APIs — Open-Meteo (weather) + Alpha Vantage (finance)

Decision

The family adopts two read-only external data APIs:

• Open-Meteo — weather (forecast / current / historical). Unlimited free, no auth, no API key, no card.
• Alpha Vantage — finance (stocks / forex / crypto / macro / technical indicators). 25 requests/day + 5 requests/minute free, free API key (email signup), no card.

Both are fronted by the umbrella Hono Worker at api.oriz.in. Browsers never call them directly — every request goes through Worker routes that apply Workers KV caching per the CF Worker quota mitigation playbook:

Why

• Open-Meteo unlimited free + no auth is the lowest-friction weather API the family found — no key to rotate, no card, multi-model ensemble forecast. Beats OpenWeatherMap (1K/day, key required), WeatherAPI (1M/mo, key), Tomorrow.io (card past trial), Visual Crossing (card past trial).
• Alpha Vantage broadest free coverage on one key — stocks
  • forex + crypto + commodities + macro indicators + technical indicators. 25/day cap is tight, but mitigated by KV cache + cron-driven warm-cache for top tickers. Beats Twelve Data (card past free), Finnhub (card past trial), IEX Cloud (no free tier), Polygon.io (US-only + card).
• Both no-card — fits no-card-on-file.
• Both fronted by the umbrella Worker — keeps the API key (Alpha Vantage) on the server, lets KV caching amortise burns, lets per-route quota alarms fire via Axiom at 70% of cap (per the CF Worker quota mitigation playbook fail-safes).

Implications

Architecture

• api.oriz.in/weather/* route in the umbrella Worker proxies Open-Meteo. Anonymous fetch upstream; the Worker applies KV cache + edge Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600 on the response. No API key in any environment.
• api.oriz.in/finance/* route proxies Alpha Vantage. API key sourced from Doppler (per secrets-management-doppler), mirrored to the Worker via wrangler secret put. Browser callers never see the key.
• Cron-driven warm-cache job (CF Cron Trigger per cron-split-cf-vs-gh) pre-populates KV with top-50 tickers at 18:00 UTC daily. Burns ~10–15 of the 25 daily Alpha Vantage requests on a deterministic schedule, leaving 10–15 for ad-hoc lookups.
• Per-Worker quota alarm at 20 of 25 daily Alpha Vantage requests (separate from the 100K Worker request cap) fires via Axiom + Better Stack incident — gives a 5-request buffer before fail-closed.

Volume budget

• Open-Meteo: realistic family-wide load with 1h cache is in the low hundreds of fetches/day at the soft cap of 10K — ~2% of the envelope. Locked headroom for if a future site goes viral with a weather widget.
• Alpha Vantage: 25/day cap minus 10–15 warm-cache burns = 10–15 ad-hoc lookups/day. Sufficient for the in-flight oriz-finance site at family scale; if usage outgrows this, the swap target is Twelve Data (800/day, also no card).

Geocoding NOT in this decision

Geocoding stays deferred — separate decision, separate concept file. None of the 11 sites need address ? coordinate translation today. CF-IPCountry header covers every current geo-routing need.

What we don't do

• No browser-side calls to either API. All traffic flows through the umbrella Worker so KV caching applies and the Alpha Vantage key stays server-side.
• No paid tiers at either provider — fail-closed on quota is preferable to card-on-file.
• No standalone weather / finance app is in scope from this decision. The APIs are reusable infrastructure for whatever feature lands first.
• No long-term archive of either API's data — both upstreams keep history. The family caches at the edge for performance, not storage.

Cross-refs

• Open-Meteo service entry
• Alpha Vantage service entry
• Data APIs index
• CF Worker quota mitigation playbook
• Umbrella Hono Worker decision
• Cron split decision — drives the warm-cache job
• Secrets management — Alpha Vantage key in Doppler
• Geocoding deferred decision
• No card-on-file rule
• Never hit quotas rule