Weather.Co is free for every pilot.

Weather.Co Pro existed for about six months. It wasn't wrong — it was in the way.

When I shipped the paid tier, the reasoning was conventional indie-app stuff: free version for discovery, Pro for the features serious pilots actually need. Proactive briefings, route weather, severe-weather alerts, the full TAF decoder. Things that take work to build, so charge for them.

The problem wasn't the price. Pro was $4/month or $30/year — a rounding error against AOPA membership, a $9 burger, anything pilots already pay for. The problem was what the paywall did to the rest of the product. Every time someone hit a Pro screen for the first time, the app stopped being "the weather tool I trust" and started being "a sales surface trying to convert me." That second job was worse for the product than the first job was good for the business.

And there was a second thing. The thing Weather.Co is actually trying to do — make GA pilots safer with weather they don't have to interpret cold — doesn't work if the better version costs extra. The pilot whose decision changes because they did or didn't see severe weather coming isn't the Pro subscriber. It's everyone.

Everything. Not "everything except the new stuff." Just everything.

• Proactive briefings — pre-flight, in-flight, post-flight. Natural-language summary on top of the raw observations.
• Route weather — METAR + TAF + winds aloft along your planned route, color-coded for the segment.
• Severe-weather alerts — push notifications for SIGMETs and convective AIRMETs along your route + airports.
• Full TAF decoder — every group expanded, with the time math done. No more squinting at TEMPO 1820/1824 4SM -SHRA BKN015.
• Multi-source fallbacks — Apple WeatherKit, NWS, OpenWeatherMap, WeatherAPI.com behind Open-Meteo. Why.
• Watch + iPad surfaces — every Pro feature carries across.

Existing Pro subscribers get refunded for unused time and keep the app exactly as it was — minus the paywall doors. There's no degraded "former Pro" state; the app is just the app now.

The standing promise to CFIs hasn't changed. It's just no longer the only people who get this.

From day one, Weather.Co was free for every CFI and every flight school — forever, no enrollment fee, no per-student cost. That was the right call: instructors shouldn't have to choose between the tool that makes their students safer and a personal subscription line item.

The CFI program continues exactly as before. The only difference: now their students don't pay either. Which makes everything cleaner — there's no "use the school's version vs. your own free-with-ads thing." It's all the same app, all free, all on every device the pilot owns.

It mostly already does. The studio's costs for Weather.Co are shockingly small.

Weather.Co runs on Cloudflare Workers. The API proxies are edge-cached. The data sources are mostly free (NWS, Open-Meteo) or generous-quota commercial (WeatherKit). The biggest line item is the Apple Developer Program membership, which I'd be paying anyway. The second biggest is my own time, which has the same opportunity cost whether I'm shipping for one pilot or for ten thousand.

The studio has other revenue paths — Outpost.Co is shipping this summer, tmpo is in TestFlight, custom builds come in through the studio inbox. Weather.Co doesn't need to carry a paid-tier revenue line for the studio to work.

If down the line the math changes — if Weather.Co alone is what's bottlenecked by infrastructure cost — the right answer is a tip jar or a one-time supporter purchase, not a subscription. The standing rule (no rent on software you already paid for) doesn't change.

Nothing.

The TestFlight + App Store builds rolling out this week are paywall-free for everyone. If you had Pro: it auto-unlocks. If you didn't: every screen is open. If you ever paid: your refund will land on your card in 5–10 business days. No action on your end.

The CFI sign-up page at kuhlman-co.com/cfi stays open — useful if you want the school-roster onboarding flow rather than telling pilots to download individually.

That's the announcement. Fly safe.