Meridian’s public demo runs on OpenWeather’s free tier with server-side caching and daily call budgets. That keeps costs honest and protects the key from accidental abuse.
You may see soft-stale data when budgets are tight, or fewer high-resolution hours than a paid meteorology workstation would show. We surface that reality in product copy instead of hiding it.
SEO place pages share the same upstream discipline: hot places refresh more often; cold places wait for a hit. That is intentional quota design, documented in our ops notes.
If you self-host Meridian for heavier traffic, start with your own API key and stronger cache — not by removing rate-limit awareness from the code.
