🎯 I Built weatherradar to Solve a Specific Problem — Let’s Talk Simplicity and Focus
Hey Indie Hackers đź‘‹
This isn’t a product pitch. It’s a breakdown of a real problem I faced—and how building a tiny, focused tool helped solve it.
I work remotely and often head outdoors for filming, writing, or meetings. In those situations, having real-time radar visibility (rain, wind, cloud fronts) is critical. But most weather apps out there felt bloated, slow, or overloaded with things I didn’t need.
So I built weatherradar.im — a clean, fast, radar-first weather viewer designed with just one thing in mind: clarity.
🧩 The Problem: Radar Data, Buried Under Bloat
Here’s what I consistently ran into:
Radar maps that took forever to load or lagged between frames
Annoying ads, news feeds, or unnecessary alerts
Poor mobile UX for actual radar functionality
High-cost or locked-down weather APIs for devs
And it turns out, I wasn’t alone. A few friends who work in media, farming, and logistics echoed the same frustrations.
⚙️ Under the Hood: Tech Stack Breakdown
Site: weatherradar.im
This is what powers the tool:
Map rendering: Leaflet.js, a lightweight open-source mapping library with excellent mobile support
Radar data: Integrated with the public RainViewer API, which offers global coverage and playback
Location detection: Native HTML5 Geolocation + OpenCage reverse geocoding
Frontend: Vite + Vue3 for speedy builds and clean component management
CDN: Cloudflare for edge delivery and fast tile rendering
Caching: Service workers for local cache and offline fallback
Page loads in under 1 second on most mobile devices, with time-to-interactive under 800ms.
đź“Š The Goal: Validating Minimalist Tools for Niche Use Cases
This is part of my experiment in vertical micro-tools—tools that solve one hyper-specific need well.
With weatherradar.im, I wanted to validate:
Are there enough people who want “just radar” without the noise?
Can minimal design and clean UX drive usage, without adding more features?
Are creators, cyclists, drone pilots, or farmers underserved by current tools?
I’m tracking everything via a simple in-house analytics layer (no Google Analytics), and I’m happy to exchange ideas on how to do privacy-respecting metrics tracking too.
🧠Let’s Talk:
Have you ever built a personal tool because the market version was too bloated?
Any favorite lightweight weather APIs worth checking out?
Would an embeddable widget or public API add real value here?
Anyone explored commercial models for radar/weather-focused tools?
🧪 Try It Out
👉 https://weatherradar.im
No logins, no ads, no popups—just straight-up radar.
Still very early, so all feedback is welcome!
Thanks to the Indie Hackers community for being a place where we can talk openly about these small but meaningful experiments. Hope this gives you some inspiration for your own side tools too 🚀
This is really great! Simple and fast.
Appreciate it! I wanted to keep it dead simple and fast — glad it worked for you. Let me know if anything could be better!