OpenWeather’s free tier is generous for a focused demo and fragile if every hover becomes a network call. Meridian treats the key as a shared budget: cache weather payloads, debounce refreshes, and prefer local formatting when the user only changes units or tabs.
City cards and detail pages reuse fetched snapshots where possible. Manual refresh is available when you know conditions changed; background polls stay conservative so free-tier call budgets last through the day.
Geocode and One Call endpoints count separately in practice — search typos should not cost a full weather pull. Failed upstream responses surface as honest UI errors instead of silent retries in a loop.
If you fork the project for heavier traffic, the first upgrades are a private key, stronger server cache, and dialling back showcase prefetch — not removing the rate-limit awareness that shaped this code.
