Most Commented on Story — The government forecaster, MetService, has again flexed its muscle towards WeatherWatch.co.nz by raising the price of our daily highs feed from zero to almost $30,000 – forcing WeatherWatch.co.nz to scrap the service altogether.

Head weather analyst Philip Duncan says the pricing is astronomical for a product that isn’t even used for forecasting.  “This is the list of daily highs, taken from publicly owned weather stations across the country. We expected a small fee, but to suggest $29,400 plus GST per year as a price is simply designed to again block WeatherWatch.co.nz from providing a service to the public of New Zealand”.

“We accept the government asks MetService to make a profit but when does that become anti competitive?  MetService is one of the most profitable SOE’s in the country, they don’t need to charge wild prices for very small products”

Mr Duncan says the WeatherWatch.co.nz website receives only a fraction of the traffic MetService.com does, but are treated as serious competition.  “We have never seen MetService as competition, we openly say we’d like to work with them, especially around severe weather events, but they aren’t interested”.

MetService has long had a reputation for being expensive.  In the past few years WeatherWatch.co.nz has been quoted anywhere from $40,000 to $200,000 to have radar images on our website – the very same ones that are free at MetService.com.

Despite being a state owned enterprise MetService receives significant tax payer funding for various services.

Mr Duncan says he will be raising this with the Commerce Commission, as he did last year with the rain radar network.

After years of public pressure by WeatherWatch.co.nz MetService finally agreed to free up the radar service in November last year, from hourly updates to 7 minute updates

“In the past I think some in the public thought WeatherWatch had an issue with MetService – now I think the public are very clearly seeing it is their bullying attitude towards us that is causing the problems”.

The price change came when WeatherWatch.co.nz asked MetService for a new FTP site to retrieve the data.  “We said we expected a reasonable fee to do this and were willing to pay one – but $30,000 a year for something that is used as just an interest piece at the end of each day is simply ludicrous”.

Despite this data being free in most other countries MetService says the pricing was based on other prices in the market.

“We have a serious problem when the government forecaster jumps at the chance to charge huge amounts of money for these products but refuses to even reply to our requests of working proactively together in the interests of public safety, which we have done repeatedly over the past 6 months”.

WeatherWatch.co.nz is looking into other options for the service.