Having the data available for download and a paywalled API is pretty standard practice for a lot of this kind of data. Copernicus weather/satellite data is ofte

Having the data available for download and a paywalled API is pretty standard practice for a lot of this kind of data. Copernicus weather/satellite data is often setup like this. There's a free download option, a free (limited) API, and then if you wanna get fancy you can use a more feature rich paid API. Many other weather services do similar. It seems to work pretty well with the usual caveats.