Help & FAQ

It covers the whole arc of a session: whether to go out at all, when the best window is, what to wear, where to ride, what is on the road ahead, and a record of it afterwards. Weather is the spine running through all of it — every tool is built on a forecast read the way an athlete reads it, not the way a forecaster writes it.

For most of it, yes — a free one. Your routes, spots, rides and alert settings all belong to an account. Three things are open to everyone with no sign-up: the What to Wear tool, the city ride guides, and the blog.

Yes. On Android, RideByWeather is on Google Play — search for it there or use the link below. On iPhone there is no App Store listing yet, so it installs straight from the browser instead: open the site in Safari and choose “Add to Home Screen” from the share menu. Either way you get a real icon, a full screen with no browser bars, and offline access to routes you have already opened.

No. Cycling, running and walking each get their own dashboard, their own score and their own gear advice. A runner and a cyclist in identical weather get genuinely different answers, because wind punishes a cyclist far more and humidity punishes a runner far more.

It answers one question: how good is this hour, for your sport, against a perfect day. Roughly — 8 to 10 is the kind of day you rearrange plans for, 6 to 8 is a good session with one thing to dress around, 4 to 6 is doable but you will notice the weather the whole way, and under 4 means something out there is working against you hard enough to think twice.

Wind carries the most weight at about 40 percent, because it affects every single minute and cannot be paced around. Then temperature and feels-like at 20 percent, precipitation at 15, gusts at 10, humidity at 10, and visibility and safety conditions at 5. Your sport and bike type then re-weight the whole thing.

Because it is tuned to the person, not only the place. A gravel rider, a road racer on deep-section wheels, a runner and a walker are each affected differently by the same wind and the same heat. Set your sport and bike type in Settings and the number changes with them.

Two reasons. The score is not a forecast, it is a judgement about the forecast, so it can be low on a sunny day when the wind is brutal. And for the current hour we overlay the nearest real weather station’s live reading on top of the model, because models can run an hour behind the actual sky. That is deliberate, and it usually puts us closer to what you would feel stepping outside.

A best-ride-window push each morning telling you when today’s good hours are (Pro). Storm alerts when dangerous weather is moving toward you. A dusk reminder when you are cutting it close to dark. And a weekly email digest if you want one. Each is a separate switch — turn on only what you want.

Work down this list. One: the toggle in Settings has to be on. Two: your browser must have been granted notification permission — if you dismissed that prompt once, the browser remembers and will not ask again, so you have to re-allow it in site settings. Three: on iPhone, web notifications only work if the app is installed to your Home Screen; in an ordinary Safari tab they will never arrive, and that is Apple’s rule rather than ours. Four: aggressive battery savers on some Android phones suspend background delivery. Five: clearing site data unsubscribes the device, so switch the toggle off and on again after doing that.

Indirectly, and it is worth understanding why. Our Connect IQ app is a readout — it asks us for conditions and displays them on the watch or head unit. It cannot receive pushes on its own, because Garmin gives third-party apps no way to do that. What does work is the phone in your pocket: if it has RideByWeather notifications enabled and your Garmin is paired with Smart Notifications on, the alert lands on the phone and Garmin relays it to your wrist or bars like any other notification.

Yes, they are separate. Email preferences have their own section in Settings, and every email we send also carries a one-click unsubscribe link that works without logging in.

Install the RideByWeather app from the Garmin Connect IQ store and open it on the device, where it shows a short pairing code. Enter that code on the pairing page while logged in on your phone or computer, and the device is linked to your account. Live temperature, wind and conditions appear on-device from then on.

Yes. There is a Wear OS app that pairs the same way, with a code rather than making you type a password on a watch face.

Not live yet. The integration is built and submitted to Wahoo for approval. When it lands it will push routes to the head unit and import finished rides. It will not send live alerts mid-ride, because Wahoo’s API does not offer that — better you know now than buy Pro expecting it.

Yes. Import a GPX file or build a route, open it before you leave, and the follow view keeps working with no connection, because it is drawn from stored coordinates rather than streamed map tiles. Weather will not refresh while you are offline, for the obvious reason.

A free account gets the Ride Score for current conditions, a 7-day forecast, gear and clothing recommendations, three saved routes, one saved spot, and the installable app. The honest limit of the free tier is that you have to remember to check it — it will never tap you on the shoulder.

Pro is $2.99 a month with a 14-day free trial. It adds the daily best-window push, the “where should I ride?” ranking across your favourite spots, a 24-hour forecast for one specific route so you know when to leave, a 14-day score forecast instead of 7, wind-aware route optimisation, and unlimited saved routes.

$39 a month, built for clubs rather than individuals: up to 25 rider accounts, shared club routes and spots, branded route collections, group ride scheduling, and member ride-window alerts.

Open the account menu and choose Manage billing. That opens the Stripe billing portal, where you can cancel, change card, or download invoices. Cancelling stops the next charge and you keep Pro until the end of the period you have already paid for. Nothing is deleted when you cancel.

Send it through the contact form with Billing as the topic, and include the date and the amount. Billing messages jump the queue.

Use the forgotten-password link to reset it. That works even if you never received the original activation email. If the reset email has not arrived within a few minutes, check spam, then get in touch — we can see whether the account exists and whether mail to your address is bouncing.

There is a resend link on the login screen. If a second one does not arrive either, that usually means your mail provider is filtering us, so tell us through the contact form and we will sort it out from our end.

There is a page for it that spells out exactly what gets removed before you commit to anything, and it is reachable without being logged in.

The interface is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese — switch it from the footer. The written content, meaning the city guides and the blog articles, is still English only.

It is used to produce your forecast and to find what is near you, and it is not sold. The privacy policy is the full and binding answer rather than this summary, and it carries an address for data requests.

Open-Meteo leads, because it automatically picks the best regional model for wherever you are — the national weather service model over the US, the German model over Germany, and so on — which tracks reality more closely than any single global model. MET Norway backs it up as a completely independent source. For the current hour we overlay the nearest weather station’s actual reading. If every provider fails at once you get the last good data with its age shown, rather than a blank screen.

First check that the location itself is right. If it was guessed from your connection rather than from GPS it can land in the wrong neighbourhood, or on a mobile network the wrong city entirely. Set it by hand and see whether it settles. If it is still wrong, tell us what you saw and where, because a systematically wrong location is a bug we can actually chase.

Some of that comes from other riders, some from city open-data feeds, and some from OpenStreetMap, so none of it is guaranteed current. Wrong entries genuinely do get removed when they are reported, and that is the only thing keeping the map worth trusting.

Tell us, ideally with a link to the statute or the official source. Legal reference pages get corrected quickly, because a wrong one can genuinely get somebody fined.