FREE AND PRO
What the paid tier adds, what never leaves the free one, and why.
Three commitments
THE ONES THAT CONSTRAIN WHAT PRO CAN EVER BEA locked feature is always visible
Pro panels are blurred, labelled and described — never deleted and replaced with an advertisement. You can see the shape of the table you would be buying, how many rows it has and what its columns are, before you decide. Hiding a feature completely and showing an upsell is how a site teaches people to assume there is nothing behind it.
Nothing free ever becomes locked
Everything the free tier shows today it will show in five years. The Pro tier grows by adding, never by moving something across the line. If that ever stops being true, it will be because the site has been sold, and you should treat this promise as void at that point rather than trusting a page that outlived its author.
Safety information is never gated
Fire weather, storm hazards, wind-regime explainers and every link to official warnings are free, permanently. This one is not merely a promise on a pricing page: capabilities marked as safety information in assets/pro.js throw an error if any code tries to place them behind a lock, so the site fails to build rather than quietly shipping a paywall in front of an evacuation link.
The two tiers
- All 18 regions, in full — terrain, seasons, signature phenomena
- All 57 places with January and July normals
- The climograph for every place — all twelve months, drawn
- Every range, peak and pass
- All seven wind-regime explainers
- Water, snowpack and atmospheric-river explainers
- Fire weather and every official warning link
- The full sortable place table
- Twelve-month normals as numbers
- Side-by-side place comparison
- The gradient tables
- CSV / JSON export
- Everything in Free, permanently
- Full twelve-month normals as tables, for every place
- The share-of-year column — how concentrated each wet season is
- Side-by-side comparison of any two places
- The three gradient tables: rain shadow, marine reach, lapse rate
- Per-region terrain deep dives with regressed lapse rates
- Climate-division breakdowns
- CSV and JSON export of any table, with station IDs
- Saved places
- Custom thresholds on your own places
Billing is not live yet — see the honest note below.
Where this actually stands
STATED PLAINLY RATHER THAN IMPLIEDPayments are not switched on yet
Golden State Weather is a static site. There is no account system behind it today, no card is being taken, and the price has not been set — which is why that line reads as a dash rather than a number. A price on a page is a commitment, and putting a placeholder figure there that later moved would be a worse way to start than admitting it is undecided. The Pro tier is fully built as an interface — every gate on the site is real, the capability table is real, and the preview genuinely unlocks everything — but the entitlement check currently runs in your browser rather than on a server.
That means the lock is a courtesy fence, not a security boundary. Anyone who opens developer tools can set the flag. We are saying so here rather than letting you discover it, because the alternative is a site that quietly treats a localStorage boolean as access control and hopes nobody reads the source.
It is a workable position for exactly one reason: nothing gated here is a secret. Pro sells depth and convenience — more months, more tables, export. It does not sell access to a warning, an alert, or anything anyone could need in an emergency. When billing goes live, the check moves server-side and the paid data moves with it; the free tier does not change.
Every capability, and its tier
READ STRAIGHT OUT OF THE CODE, NOT RETYPEDThis list is generated from the same table the site's gates consult, so a pricing page that disagrees with the product is not possible — there is one source and this is a view of it.
Why charge at all
Because the alternatives are worse. This site has no advertising, no tracking, no cookie banner and no data sale, and it intends to keep all four. A small paid tier for the people who use it most is the least intrusive way to fund the rest.
Why so little is behind it
Because the free tier is the point. A California geography reference that most people cannot read is not a reference. Pro exists for people doing repeated work with the numbers — export, comparison, twelve-month tables — not for people who want to know what winter is like in Bishop.
What Pro will never include
Warnings, alerts, evacuation information, air quality, or anything else that someone might need urgently. If a future feature is safety-relevant it ships free, and the capability table marks it so the code refuses to gate it.