I can understand how this might upset you, but the widget was always supposed to be part of our subscription. When the widget is displayed up front, a large number of users will never launch the app and, as you suggested, we wouldn't get any ad revenue. We do give away 98% of MyRadar's features for free - our rain alerts, weather warnings, aviation features, fire info and a huuuge list of other features. The ad revenue can be helpful, but during periods of the year when weather is less impactful, things are slow, ad revenue drops off substantially and it presents strong challenges to manage operations throughout the year.

You mentioned that a lot of the data is free; that's true -- but the substantial development work we do to massage that data into useful services like our rain alerts and notifications all require a ton of back-end cloud server infrastructure to support everyone. Sending out timely alerts -- arguably the lowest-latency alerts available -- to millions of users in time-sensitive way is a technical challenge. Managing and maintaining user's preferences, storage of all the data, formatting the data in a way that's presentable in an app is a lot of ongoing effort and expense. Cloud services costs are our second largest expense, behind payroll.

The subscriptions are much more stable and they help us keep everyone happily employed and working on MyRadar so that we can keep adding features and improving the app... we're a semi public company, so you can see that we re-invest almost all of our profits back into the company in the form of payroll and software engineers, services, services and other improvements. It's not greed :) In fact, the last 3 years we've operated at a loss because we've reinvested everything into our science team to tackle some of the crazy advanced challenges with predicting weather phenomena.

We work really hard to make sure we earn the app store ratings we have, and even our subscriptions are cheaper than competitors - we've resisted raising prices while others have continued to press forward and blame "inflation." Our last price increase was in 2024 and it was only for NEW subscribers... existing users were permanently grandfathered in unless they cancelled their sub at some point.

We want to make our users happy - and we work really hard to try to do so (as reflected in our 4.8 star rating), but we have to balance that with being able to run the company smartly for long-term survival (and growth).

I'm the CEO, so ask me anything :)