Everything around the ride — not just the forecast
RideByWeather is one app for the whole outing: picking the day, dressing for it, routing around the wind, knowing what is in the road, getting home, and having it all add up afterwards. Fifty-plus tools, for cyclists, runners and walkers.
The weather engine underneath is the spine the rest of it hangs off. It is not the product.
Why it exists
Checking the forecast is the easy ten percent of going out, and it is the only part anyone had built well. A weather app hands you 64°F, wind 7 mph, 5% rain and stops there. It has never once told you whether to go, what to put on, which way round the loop to ride it, what is waiting in the road, or where the nearest open shop is when you snap a chain nineteen miles from home.
Every one of those questions has an answer. They were just scattered across six apps, three browser tabs and a group chat. RideByWeather is the attempt to put them in one place, in the order you actually hit them.
What it covers
The arc of a single outing, start to finish:
Decide when to go
A 0–10 score for every hour of the next two days, tuned to your sport, so the best window is something you glance at rather than work out. Rank your saved spots against each other, score a specific route hour by hour, or let the overnight push tell you when tomorrow is worth getting up for.
How the score works →Get the bike and the body ready
The layers for those exact numbers rather than a generic chart, tire pressure for your weight and tires, the right chain lube for the conditions, what is due a service, and hydration and caffeine timing for the day you are about to have.
What to wear →Build the route around the wind
Draw or import a route and see headwind and tailwind segment by segment, with elevation — so you go out into it and come home with it behind you. Save it, share it, or send it to your Garmin.
Plan a route →It comes with you
Live ride mode stays awake on the bars, records the ride, and speaks heads-up alerts as conditions change. Follow a route with no signal at all. Sunset lights reminders, storm alerts and lightning tracking while you are still out in it.
Live ride mode →Know what is in the road
Hazard pins from other riders, lane and trail closures, reported incidents, theft hotspots, and the nearest hospital or open bike shop when something goes wrong. Local guides for wherever you are riding.
Hazards near you →It adds up to something
Rides recorded with the weather they happened in, a one-tap rating of how they felt, streaks, on-this-day, and training plans that read all of it — so the app can tell the difference between you being unfit and it being ninety-four degrees.
Streaks and history →The full list — including the odd corners like e-bike range, bike-vs-drive, pollen and sensitive-lungs mode, family mode and multi-day tour planning — is on the features page.
The score, and what is actually in it
The Ride Score collapses an hour of weather into one 0–10 number so you can read two days at a glance. It is not a black box, and it is not the same formula for everyone. Here is the cycling weighting, exactly as the code applies it:
Wind
40%Direction and speed against your actual route bearings, not just a number on a dial.
Temperature
20%Feels-like — wind chill in the cold, heat index in the heat.
Precipitation
15%Probability and intensity, hour by hour.
Gusts
10%Adjusted for your bike — a deep-section wheel and a loaded tourer are not the same day out.
Humidity
10%How efficiently you can shed heat — the hidden driver of hot-day difficulty.
Safety
5%Near-severe combinations, plus a hard ceiling so a calm, dry, dangerous day can never read GREAT.
Running and walking are scored by a different model, because they are a different problem. There, temperature carries 35% and humidity 20% — heat is what ruins a run — air quality is 15%, and wind drops to 5%, because a headwind you can run through is not the day-defining event it is on a bike.
Read the scale in plain English in What Is a Good Ride Score?
Where the numbers come from
We don't forecast the weather. We interpret the best forecasts available through the lens of riding, running and walking. Hourly wind, temperature, precipitation and humidity come from professional numerical models via Open-Meteo, with MET Norway behind it as a fallback so one provider having a bad day doesn't take the app with it. Nearby station observations overlay the current hour, severe-weather warnings come from the National Weather Service, and air quality and pollen have their own feeds.
Everything off the forecast has a source too: shops, trails, water and hospitals from OpenStreetMap, closures and reported incidents from city open-data portals where they exist, hazard pins from riders using the app, and elevation from public terrain models. Wind chill and heat index use the same math the National Weather Service uses.
Where a source is thin for your area, the app says so rather than filling the gap with a confident guess.
Who it is for
Commuters timing the dry window. Weekend riders chasing the calmest morning. Runners pacing around the heat index. Someone training for a first century with no idea how to get from where they are now to a hundred miles. Anyone who would rather not gamble on the forecast — and would rather not keep six apps open to avoid it.
Cycling, running and walking share one account, one history and one set of saved places. There is a free tier that stays free, and Pro for the parts that save you the most time.
How it is built
- Every claim has to survive the data. Guides and articles are written to match what the forecast actually supports, and the scoring caps exist specifically to stop a good-looking number from describing a dangerous day.
- It ships constantly, and says what changed. Every release is written up in plain English on the changelog.
- It works where you ride. Installable on the phone, readable on a Garmin, and able to follow a route with no signal at all — because the moment you need it most is usually the moment you have no bars.
- It is not a substitute for your judgement. Safety, hazard and medical lookups are there to inform a decision, not to make it. If it looks wrong out of the window, go with the window.
Something missing, or something wrong? Tell us — or vote on what gets built next in feature requests.
See what today looks like
It takes a few seconds to find your next good window.