I really love this app and use it since many years ago, thats why I am very unhappy being forced to use other apps together.
Here in Portugal the most reliable source is ECMWF however this app does not provide its clouds, making it unusefull. I must stick to CMC that fails often, and use other free apps that provide ECMWF with clouding.
What a pity. I bet there’s a good reason, buy there’s no way at all to include all the data?
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It costs $150,000 Euro per year to buy ECMWF 9km data.
The data you see in Flowx is the free 25km ECMWF data which does not release total cloud as part of the free data set.
I read somewhere that they may make all data free in Nov 2025.
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Let’s hope so. Otherwise it is almost unuseful.
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Gemini tells me FlowX has 500,000+ users (congratulations!). If you get, say, 10% of those to subsrcibe to ECMWF 9km data via FlowX, you can charge them, say, €0.50/month for it, and make a neat €150,000/yr profit.
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If only those numbers just worked like that 
500,000+ is the total downloads since 2012, not the current number of users. Less than 10% of users currently subscribe. When I released Flowx for $2/year I thought I’d get a lot of buyer and make much profit - didn’t happen - people saw $2 as a toy.
Flowx is now $20/year with superior models to ECMWF, like DWD D2 and Arome - both of which are based (nested in) on the ECMWF model - and I’m not making anywhere near a $150k profit.
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Yeah, bc, sorry to be blunt, businesswise, you’re doing it wrong. You were doing if wrong when you were charging $2/year, and you’re still doing it wrong charging $20/year. You need to charge per data source, not functionality. This way you can offer pretty much all data sources in the world, and not be restricted by its cost. Just divvy up the cost of each data source by the number of people subscribing to it in the app, add a markup, and you’re good to go. This way, you can also offer the complete functionality of the app to all users over the free data sources, and not have to be stingy about it to free users. By doing that, you’ll price discriminate those common free users from, say, farmers and athletes, who rely on weather forecasts for their livelihood, and so need greater precision than what free sources offer.
Engineering-wise, the app is second to none; businesswise you’re behind. And that slows down your engineering too, bc you don’t get the revenue you deserve to reinvest in the app. Fundamentally, what you’re doing is reselling data wrapped in a nice GUI. If you charge for the data you’re reselling instead of the GUI, you’ll align your revenue with your costs, thereby maximising your profit and minimising its risk.
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No worries about being blunt. It is not as simple as you make it out to be.
It’s not as simple as you say. Managing multiple subscriptions for the data sources will be a nightmare. Then replicate these Android subscriptions to Apple, and now you have two nightmares.
This is the reason I removed Bronze and Silver subscriptions.
I am not being stingy to free users. I have slowly removed features for free users and not added anymore free features. This is because free users, which are over 90% of all users are figgen hard to support and you get no income from them. So if I give them more features, I give them more rope to get tangled up in, and I get more support emails.
The reason we aren’t making more money is not what you say, rather it’s marketing. I spend most of my time engineering and very little marketing. Splitting data source into different subscription models will not change much. Marketing will.
Ok, here’s a question, let’s say ECMWF costs $150k per year, I pay for a year of ECMWF data and I charge $12/year for ECMWF - what happens if I don’t get 10% new subscribers? I will be massively out of pocket.
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That came out wrong, sorry. I meant that you don’t have to put yourself in the position of rationing functionality to convey value to the subscription.
Yeah, it’s a risk, but it’s a smaller risk than endeavouring to recoup the cost of all paid data with a single subscription, bc you have more degrees of freedom. If you charge $12/yr for ECMWF, you only need 2.5% of FlowX users to subscribe to it to break even, not 10% new subscribers.
The customer you want doesn’t need marketing; marketing gets you common users, and commons users won’t pay bc they have no justification for the expense. Specialised users–farmers, builders, event planners, sportsmen…–do. They’ll pay you if you can save them money with better forecasts. And, as you said, common users are figgen hard to support and you get no income from them.
So what I’m suggesting to you is: build the app for the specialised users, resell them the premium data through the app, and let all functionality free over the free data. Specialised users will pay for higher accuracy; common users will continue toying with it, and not pay you a dime. Let them be your guinea p… beta testers, and your word-of-mouth marketers. I, for one, am always caught bragging about being a FlowX user, instead of the usual x% of rain sort of weather apps.
More of a nightmare than managing different functionalities for free and paid users? It’s as simple as having a flag in the app for which sources the user paid for, no? If he didn’t, it doesn’t show, just like today the app doesn’t show 10-day forecasts to free users.
Indeed I imagine it isn’t. I’m looking from outside, as a user, not its creator and developer, that lived and breathed it for the last… 14 years?
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Extra days and data sources are used to convey the value of a subscription. All other feature restriction is because I don’t want to and cannot support free users. More features = more support.
In the last 4.0 release, free users complained that the GFS data was worse and blocky. It took me a while but I realised it was because I gave free users the same zoom as pro users, they zoomed in more and made the data look more “pixelated”. I have since reset the max zoom for free users to 3.0 levels.
Other than RainViewer, which is now gone, all data sources in Flowx are freely downloadable.
There is a major risk on forking out $150k per year for ECMWF because I don’t even make half that amount a year.
When I say marketing, I mean targeted marketing, e.g. aviation or drone pilots.
Yes, far more. You upload an app to Google and Apple with subscriptions - then you’ll understand. I used to have “if silver do this, if gold or silver do that”, now I’m close to “if pro do this or that”
It’s not as simple as you say. I’ve had other users suggest strategies and they are different to what you suggest - so who is right? you or them?
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You decide! 
(of course)
That actually makes it easier to transition from one business model to the other. You can try start offering premium data subscriptions as an add-on, in addition to the pro subscription, without having to overhaul the whole business model in one go. And if in time, you find that the premium data subscription model pays you better than the pro subscription model, you discontinue the latter, and not worry about having to manage two tiers of users.
Yeah, that’s the typical risk any old country town store would take in investing on inventory to resell to their town’s customers. Nowadays, with vertically managed supply chains, that skill is sorta gone, but it used to be commonplace to buy wholesale to sell retail. This is no different.
Hadn’t even thought of them! Yeah, I’d focus on them. Market the app as a professional weather forecast, distinct from the plethora of dolled up weather apps that abound in the app stores. In fact, any business for which weather is a risk they can better manage with more accurate forecasts, is a potential paying customer. Maybe ECMWF is not even the lowest hanging fruit for you to give them (I don’t know your market at all).
More than fair. If you’re not selling our data, you shouldn’t be expected to work for free.
Or, alternatively, you support only paying subscribers (in either model), and leave it up to the user community to provide free support.
Yeah, that’s a recipe for a daily headache. What I’m suggesting is that you can go one step further, and get rid of the “if pro do this or that” altogether, if you find the true essence of your business. IMHO, it’s reselling premium weather data wrapped in a professional GUI, but each entrepreneur has to do their own business soul searching for himself. As you said, it’s not that simple.
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