9 Best OpenWeather Air Pollution & UV API Alternatives & Competitors

1. Digital Earth Africa

Weather & Environment

Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) is a continental-scale open data platform that makes analysis-ready satellite data freely accessible for the entire African continent, providing tools, datasets, and APIs that allow researchers, governments, NGOs, and developers to extract valuable insights from years of Earth observation imagery without requiring specialized remote sensing expertise or high-performance computing infrastructure. Backed by African governments and international development partners including the African Union, Digital Earth Africa addresses the fundamental challenge that satellite data — while publicly available — historically required substantial technical expertise and computing resources to process, making it inaccessible to most African organizations. The DE Africa platform is built on the Open Data Cube framework and exposes satellite datasets as analysis-ready datacubes where each pixel contains atmospherically corrected, geometrically accurate surface reflectance values aligned across time. This means Nigerian data scientists and environmental analysts can query pixel-level time series data across Nigerian territory without the complex preprocessing normally required for raw satellite imagery. The Python API enables querying: "Show me the vegetation index (NDVI) for all farmland pixels in Kano State for every July from 2015 to 2025" — a query that would previously require months of data processing. Water monitoring datasets from DE Africa include the Water Observations from Space (WOfS) dataset, which classifies every pixel in Africa as water or non-water based on Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery analysis. For Nigerian flood monitoring platforms, this dataset provides historical flood extent mapping across Nigeria — enabling analysis of which areas in the Niger Delta, Benue Valley, and Sokoto Rima floodplains are repeatedly inundated and need permanent flood risk classification. The Waterbodies dataset monitors changes in the extent of lakes, reservoirs, and rivers over time. Vegetation and land cover datasets support Nigerian agricultural and environmental monitoring. The Annual Crop Mask dataset classifies agricultural land across Africa, allowing Nigerian agricultural agencies to estimate cropland extent by state and track year-on-year changes in agricultural land use. The Fractional Cover dataset quantifies the proportion of bare soil, green vegetation, and non-green vegetation in each pixel, useful for monitoring rangeland health in the Sahel portions of northern Nigeria and detecting land degradation. Coastline monitoring data from the Continental Coastlines dataset maps the African shoreline and tracks changes over time due to erosion, sedimentation, and sea-level effects. Nigeria's Atlantic coastline in the Niger Delta region is subject to intense erosion pressures due to oil infrastructure, wave action, and reduced sediment supply. Nigerian coastal management agencies and environmental researchers can use DE Africa coastline data to quantify erosion rates and identify the most vulnerable coastal communities. The DE Africa Sandbox provides a browser-based Jupyter notebook environment where Nigerian developers and analysts can explore datasets, run Python code against the datacube API, and visualize results without any local installation. This browser-accessible development environment lowers the barrier to entry for Nigerian universities, research institutes, and NGOs that want to experiment with satellite data analysis without infrastructure investment. Digital Earth Africa data and platform access are entirely free, funded as a public good by African governments and international partners. Nigerian government agencies, universities, research institutes, and civil society organizations can access all datasets without subscription fees, supporting evidence-based environmental management, agricultural policy, and climate adaptation planning across Nigeria.

2. Air Quality Index (AQI)

Development Tools, Weather & Environment

Air Quality Index (AQI) API by aqicn.org provides real-time air quality data for over 10,000 monitoring stations across 100+ countries, delivering AQI values, individual pollutant concentrations (PM2.5, PM10, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide), weather data, and health impact information in a unified API response. As urbanization and industrialization increase air pollution levels across Nigerian cities, the AQI API enables Nigerian health tech developers, environmental monitoring platforms, smart city initiatives, and public health organizations to build air quality awareness tools that help citizens make informed decisions about outdoor activities and exposure. Air Quality Index values are returned on the standard 0-500 AQI scale with breakpoints corresponding to health risk categories: Good (0-50), Moderate (51-100), Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups (101-150), Unhealthy (151-200), Very Unhealthy (201-300), and Hazardous (301-500). The API also returns the dominant pollutant driving the current AQI reading and the station name and location for the data source. Nigerian environmental health apps can display color-coded AQI dashboards using these standardized categories, making air quality data immediately interpretable by everyday Nigerians without requiring scientific background. PM2.5 (fine particulate matter 2.5 microns or smaller) is the pollutant of greatest health concern in Nigerian cities, associated with vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions, generator fumes, and Harmattan dust from the Sahara that blankets northern Nigeria between November and March. The AQI API returns PM2.5 concentration in micrograms per cubic meter alongside the derived AQI value, enabling Nigerian health apps to give specific warnings about fine particulate exposure during Harmattan season when PM2.5 levels spike significantly across the country. Station coverage in Nigeria includes monitoring stations in Lagos, Abuja, and other major cities where air quality monitoring infrastructure has been deployed by environmental agencies and international organizations. The API aggregates data from diverse station networks, and for locations without nearby monitoring stations, it interpolates from surrounding data sources to provide coverage. Nigerian smart city platforms can use the available station data to seed their air quality dashboards and advocacy data with real measurements. Historical air quality data is accessible through the API, allowing retrieval of past AQI readings and pollutant concentrations. Nigerian environmental researchers and public health analysts can use historical AQI data to correlate air pollution levels with respiratory disease rates, seasonal patterns (particularly Harmattan), and event-driven pollution spikes (such as industrial accidents or large-scale refuse burning). This historical analysis supports evidence-based environmental policy advocacy. Health advisories based on AQI levels can be generated by Nigerian health apps using the standardized AQI category thresholds: recommending indoor activities when AQI exceeds 150, advising sensitive groups including children, elderly, and asthma patients to avoid outdoor exposure when AQI exceeds 100, and suggesting N95 mask use during Harmattan when PM2.5-driven AQI spikes. Digital health platforms serving Nigerian families can incorporate automatic AQI-based health alerts. The AQI API offers a free tier with 1,000 requests per hour and API key access — sufficient for small to medium Nigerian environmental monitoring apps. Commercial plans provide higher limits, token-based access for multiple projects, and access to additional historical data depth. The combination of free access, global coverage, and health-contextualized data makes the AQI API an excellent choice for Nigerian environmental tech developers and public health organizations building air quality awareness platforms.

3. Planet Labs

Weather & Environment

Daily high-resolution satellite imagery with global coverage. Commercial platform for detailed monitoring of agriculture, disaster response, and environmental changes. APIs available for programmatic access.

4. Visual Crossing Weather API

Weather & Environment

Visual Crossing Weather API is a professional-grade weather data service particularly distinguished by its deep historical weather archive stretching back to 1970, its powerful timeline API that seamlessly combines historical, current, and forecast data in a single call, and its robust data quality and global coverage. Visual Crossing is widely adopted by researchers, data scientists, agricultural analysts, insurance actuaries, and climate-aware business applications that require not just current forecasts but the ability to analyze decades of weather history alongside recent conditions and future projections in unified datasets. The Timeline API is Visual Crossing's signature endpoint, accepting a location and an optional date range that can span any combination of past, present, and future dates. A single API call can return weather for the past 30 days and the next 15 days for any Nigerian city, making it ideal for agricultural apps that want to display a weather timeline showing recent rainfall alongside the forecast — helping farmers understand both what has fallen and what is expected in the coming weeks. This unified approach eliminates the need to stitch together multiple API calls from different endpoints. Historical weather coverage extends from 1970 to yesterday, giving Nigerian climate researchers, environmental organizations, and agribusinesses access to over 50 years of daily and hourly weather records for any location in Nigeria. Insurance companies writing crop insurance policies in Nigeria can use Visual Crossing historical data to calculate long-run rainfall averages, identify drought years, and calibrate payout thresholds for rainfall-indexed insurance products. This depth of historical data is a competitive differentiator compared to weather APIs that only provide a few years of history. Weather data variables returned by Visual Crossing include temperature (min, max, average), humidity, dew point, precipitation, snow, snowdepth, windspeed, windgust, winddir, cloud cover, visibility, UV index, solar radiation, conditions text description, sunrise/sunset times, and moon phase. The inclusion of moon phase is relevant for Nigerian fishing communities and rural farmers who use lunar phases to guide fishing and farming activities according to traditional knowledge systems. Data export capabilities make Visual Crossing particularly appealing to data science and analytics use cases. The API can return data in CSV format in addition to JSON, making it easy to load weather data directly into Nigerian data analysts' tools like Excel, Python pandas, or R without writing custom data transformation code. Nigerian agricultural research institutions can export multi-year daily weather CSVs for analysis in statistical software. Query language support allows filtering and aggregating historical data using Visual Crossing's built-in query syntax, enabling complex data queries like "daily average temperature and total precipitation for every month of the year in Kano, aggregated over 20 years" in a single API call. Nigerian climate analytics platforms can use this capability to build climate profiling tools for Nigerian cities and agricultural zones. Visual Crossing offers 1,000 free records per day (where each day of weather for one location counts as one record), with paid plans starting at $35/month for 50,000 records per day. For Nigerian agricultural analytics platforms that need extensive historical data queries during setup but lower daily volumes during operations, the pay-per-use flexibility of Visual Crossing plans makes cost management predictable.

5. Weatherbit

Weather & Environment

Weatherbit API is a reliable, developer-friendly weather data service providing current weather conditions, 16-day daily forecasts, 120-hour hourly forecasts, historical weather, weather alerts, and air quality data for any location worldwide via a clean RESTful API. Weatherbit is widely respected for its data accuracy, comprehensive endpoint coverage, well-documented API reference, and competitive pricing that makes it accessible to Nigerian startups and developers who need more than the OpenWeatherMap free tier offers but cannot justify premium AccuWeather pricing. The 16-day daily forecast horizon is one of the longest among mid-tier weather APIs, making Weatherbit particularly useful for applications that need extended agricultural or event planning forecasts. Current weather data from Weatherbit includes temperature, apparent temperature, humidity, dew point, wind speed and direction, wind gust, sea-level pressure, precipitation, snowfall (globally), snow depth, cloud coverage, visibility, solar radiation, UV index, air quality index, and a detailed weather description code. The weather description code system maps to a comprehensive set of condition descriptions covering sunny, partly cloudy, overcast, various rain intensities (light, moderate, heavy, freezing), thunderstorm types, fog, and dust/sand conditions — the last of which is directly relevant to Nigerian Harmattan season when dust and sand from the Sahara reduces visibility across the country's northern and central regions. Hourly forecasting extends 120 hours (5 days) in advance with full hourly weather variables, enabling granular short-term planning for weather-sensitive Nigerian business operations. Construction site managers can check hour-by-hour rain probability before scheduling concrete pours. Event coordinators can assess whether weather will clear by the 6pm start of an outdoor concert. Agricultural drone operators can identify the optimal spray window between rain events by examining the 5-day hourly precipitation timeline. The 16-day daily forecast is Weatherbit's extended forecast offering, providing daily minimum and maximum temperature, precipitation probability and accumulation, wind speed and direction, humidity, UV index, sunrise/sunset times, and weather description for 16 days ahead. Nigerian farmers planning crop cycle activities — planting, fertilizer application, harvest scheduling — benefit from the 16-day horizon which aligns with the two-week planning cycles common in smallholder Nigerian agriculture. Air quality data is available through Weatherbit's Air Quality API endpoint, returning PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, CO, and O3 concentrations alongside AQI values derived from EPA standards. Nigerian environmental monitoring apps that also need weather data for context can combine Weatherbit's weather and air quality endpoints under a single API account, simplifying data source management. Weather alert notifications from Weatherbit cover severe weather warnings issued by official meteorological authorities. Nigerian alert platforms and emergency management apps can poll Weatherbit alerts for any Nigerian region and surface these official warnings to app users with appropriate geographic precision. Historical weather data from Weatherbit stretches back to 2010 with daily and hourly resolution, offering over a decade of Nigerian weather records for analysis. Nigerian agricultural research institutions, insurance actuaries calculating drought years, and climate analysts building weather-indexed products can use this historical archive. Weatherbit offers a free tier of 500 calls/day with access to current weather and 7-day forecasts. Paid plans start at $35/month for 50,000 daily calls with full access to all endpoints including historical data, 16-day forecasts, and weather alerts. Nigerian developers can start with the free tier and upgrade as usage grows.

6. Tomorrow.io

Weather & Environment, Nigeria Open Data, Development Tools

Tomorrow.io (formerly ClimaCell) is an advanced weather intelligence platform that goes beyond traditional meteorological data by incorporating artificial intelligence, proprietary sensing networks, and hyperlocal data sources to deliver more accurate, street-level weather predictions than conventional numerical weather models alone can achieve. Tomorrow.io's technology combines satellite data, radar, ground-based sensors, connected vehicle data, and IoT sensors to build a higher-resolution picture of current conditions, which feeds into AI models trained on billions of historical weather observations to improve forecast accuracy particularly at short time horizons. For Nigerian businesses where weather accuracy directly impacts operations and revenue, Tomorrow.io offers a premium alternative to standard weather APIs. Hyperlocal weather data is Tomorrow.io's core value proposition: weather conditions can vary dramatically within a single city, especially in densely built-up urban areas like Lagos Island versus Lekki, or Ikeja versus Agege. Tomorrow.io's hyperlocal precision means a logistics company routing deliveries through Lagos can get weather conditions specific to individual neighborhoods rather than a single city-wide reading, improving routing decisions during localized rain showers that may affect one area while leaving adjacent areas dry. Weather layers available through Tomorrow.io include temperature, humidity, wind, precipitation (including type: rain, drizzle, freezing rain, snow, sleet), cloud cover, visibility, pressure, UV index, pollen count, fire index, ice accumulation, and road condition indicators. The road condition indicators derived from weather data are particularly useful for Nigerian logistics and transportation apps, where road quality during heavy rainfall can degrade rapidly and route planning needs to account for impassable flooded roads. Real-time and forecast severe weather alerts from Tomorrow.io provide early warning of thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, high wind events, and other hazardous conditions with geographic precision and lead times of hours to days. Nigerian event management platforms, outdoor venue operators, and emergency management apps can subscribe to Tomorrow.io alerts to automatically send warnings to relevant user segments before dangerous weather arrives at their specific location. Historical weather data through Tomorrow.io covers multiple years and returns the same rich variable set as real-time and forecast data, enabling backtesting of weather-dependent decision models. Nigerian agricultural tech companies building machine learning models that predict crop yields based on weather patterns can train their models on Tomorrow.io historical data to capture the hyperlocal weather signals that traditional reanalysis datasets like ERA5 smooth out at coarser resolution. Air quality monitoring data from Tomorrow.io includes PM2.5, PM10, NO2, CO, and an overall air quality index alongside weather data, providing a unified environmental intelligence feed for Nigerian health and environmental monitoring apps that need both weather and air quality in a single API response. Tomorrow.io offers a free developer tier with 500 API calls per day and access to core weather endpoints — enough for prototyping and small-scale Nigerian app development. Paid plans start at $20/month for 25,000 daily calls and scale to enterprise plans for high-volume production applications. Nigerian startups can start on the free tier, validate their weather product concept, and scale to paid plans as their user base and revenue grow.

7. Open-Meteo

Weather & Environment, Development Tools

Open-Meteo is a fully free and open-source weather API that provides high-resolution global weather forecasts, historical weather data, and climate projections without requiring any API key for non-commercial use. Built on top of state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) models from ECMWF, GFS, Meteo France, DWD, and other meteorological agencies, Open-Meteo delivers hourly and daily weather variables across the globe with up to 16-day forecast horizons and access to decades of historical weather records. For Nigerian developers building weather-dependent applications who want a zero-cost starting point, Open-Meteo is one of the most capable free weather APIs available. Forecast data from Open-Meteo covers a wide range of weather variables: temperature at 2 meters, apparent temperature (feels like), precipitation, rain, showers, snowfall (unlikely in Nigeria but globally relevant), cloud cover, wind speed and direction at multiple heights, wind gusts, surface pressure, relative humidity, dew point, visibility, shortwave solar radiation, and cape (Convective Available Potential Energy for thunderstorm prediction). For Nigerian agricultural apps, the combination of precipitation forecasts and solar radiation data is particularly valuable for irrigation scheduling and solar energy production forecasting. The API returns data in hourly or daily resolution, selectable per request. Hourly data enables fine-grained analysis of weather through the day — important for Nigerian logistics operations planning around Lagos or Abuja rush-hour weather, or for event managers checking window-by-window rain probabilities for an outdoor concert. Daily data provides simplified summaries including max/min temperature, precipitation sum, sunrise/sunset times, and UV index maximum — ideal for Nigerian travel apps showing week-ahead weather summaries. Historical weather data through Open-Meteo is available from 1940 to the present via the Historical Weather API endpoint, sourced from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset by ECMWF. Nigerian climate researchers, agricultural historians, and developers building data analytics tools for climate trend analysis can access decade-long weather records for any location in Nigeria including remote northern and southern regions without subscription costs. This historical depth rivals expensive commercial weather data providers. Marine forecasting is supported through a separate marine endpoint returning wave height, wave direction, wave period, swell height, and ocean surface temperature — relevant for Nigerian fishing communities, port operators in Lagos and Apapa, and oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Guinea. The marine data combined with standard atmospheric forecasts gives a complete picture of weather-related conditions for offshore and coastal Nigerian operations. Air quality forecasting from Open-Meteo includes PM2.5, PM10, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide concentrations, UV index, and European and US Air Quality Index calculations. Nigerian urban health apps monitoring air quality in Lagos (which has significant vehicle and industrial air pollution) can use the air quality forecast to send pollution warnings and health advisories to users. Climate projections through the Open-Meteo Climate API provide future temperature and precipitation projections from CMIP6 climate models, allowing comparison of projected future climate against the historical baseline. Nigerian policy researchers and environmental NGOs can use these projections to model climate change impacts on Nigerian agriculture, water resources, and urban heat islands. Open-Meteo is free for non-commercial use with no API key required — just call the endpoint with latitude, longitude, and the desired weather variables. Commercial use requires a subscription which remains affordable at under $50/month for most volumes. The API is highly reliable, well-documented, and used by thousands of developers worldwide, making it a strong foundation for any Nigerian weather-aware application.

8. IBM Weather (The Weather Company)

Weather & Environment

IBM Weather (powered by The Weather Company, an IBM Business) is an enterprise-grade weather intelligence API platform that delivers high-resolution weather forecasts, historical data, severe weather alerts, and agricultural weather intelligence to businesses and developers requiring reliable, precise meteorological data for critical operational decisions. The platform is particularly suited to agricultural applications where weather accuracy directly affects planting, spraying, irrigation, and harvest decisions that determine crop outcomes and farm profitability. The Weather Company's global weather data infrastructure is one of the most sophisticated in the commercial weather industry, combining inputs from a network of personal weather stations (among the world's densest observation networks), meteorological satellites, radar systems, radiosondes, and numerical weather prediction models. This data synthesis produces weather forecasts that often outperform public weather services in localized accuracy, particularly for short-range (1-5 day) forecasts critical for farm operational planning. IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS), the current branding of IBM's weather and sustainability analytics products, provides multiple API tiers relevant to agricultural users. The Daily Forecast APIs provide day-by-day weather parameters — temperature maximum/minimum, precipitation probability and amount, wind speed, humidity, UV index — for locations globally including Nigerian farming areas. The Hourly Forecast APIs provide time-of-day granularity that is important for spray application windows (requiring appropriate wind speed, humidity, and temperature conditions) and harvest window planning (dry conditions in specific daytime hours). Agricultural weather parameters beyond standard meteorological variables are part of IBM Weather's agricultural product suite. Evapotranspiration (ET0), growing degree days, wet bulb globe temperature, and soil temperature indices relevant to planting and crop development decisions are available through agricultural-specific API endpoints. For Nigerian farm management applications seeking to build irrigation scheduling or planting timing features, these derived agricultural parameters reduce the computation burden on the application side. Severe weather alert APIs from IBM Weather deliver structured notifications of approaching extreme weather conditions — severe thunderstorms, flash flood risk, extreme heat events, high wind advisories — that trigger time-sensitive farm management responses. For Nigerian commercial farms with irrigation infrastructure, harvested grain in the field, vulnerable greenhouse operations, or expensive equipment in the open, advance warning of severe weather through automated API-triggered alerts enables protective actions that reduce weather-related loss. The Precipitation Forecast APIs are particularly critical for Nigerian farming decision-making. In Nigeria's rain-fed farming zones, which encompass the vast majority of Nigerian agricultural production, decisions about planting timing, pre-planting fertilizer application, foliar spraying, and grain drying are all conditioned on rainfall forecast. A farm advisory app that integrates IBM Weather's high-accuracy precipitation forecasts can deliver confident planting window recommendations and input application timing guidance that directly affects farmer income. Historical weather data through IBM Weather covers decades of observations, providing the baseline needed for climate normal calculations, seasonal anomaly assessment, and validation of agronomic models. Nigerian researchers building crop models, agritech platforms developing seasonal risk assessment products, and agricultural insurance companies setting historical rainfall baselines for parametric insurance product design all benefit from accessing consistent long-term historical weather records through a single reliable commercial API. Enterprise support, uptime SLAs, and data reliability commitments from IBM make The Weather Company API appropriate for commercial agricultural applications where weather data quality directly affects customer outcomes and platform credibility. For Nigerian agritech companies building products used for high-stakes farm management decisions — when to plant, when to spray, when to harvest — a weather data provider with enterprise reliability and accountability is more appropriate than free or low-cost services with limited support.

9. Climate in Africa

Weather & Environment

Climate in Africa API is a specialized climate data service focused on providing high-quality historical climate records, seasonal forecasts, climate risk indices, and country-level climate profiles specifically for the African continent. Unlike global weather APIs that offer limited historical depth and generic climate data, Climate in Africa is designed with African climate dynamics in mind — incorporating regional climate models calibrated to the inter-tropical convergence zone, West African monsoon systems, El Nino Southern Oscillation effects on African rainfall, and the Indian Ocean Dipole influences on East African precipitation patterns. For Nigerian climate analysts, agricultural planners, and development organizations, this Africa-specific context makes Climate in Africa data more relevant and actionable than generic global climate APIs. Historical rainfall data from Climate in Africa provides long-run monthly and annual precipitation records for Nigerian locations, drawing on station observations, reanalysis data, and satellite-derived precipitation estimates to fill gaps in Nigeria's meteorological station network — particularly in data-sparse northern and rural regions. Nigerian insurance companies developing rainfall index insurance products for smallholder farmers need multi-decade historical rainfall distributions to set fair trigger thresholds and calculate actuarially sound premiums, and Climate in Africa provides this historical depth. Seasonal climate forecasts from Climate in Africa are generated using coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models that account for sea surface temperature anomalies in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans that strongly influence African rainfall variability. These forecasts provide probabilistic outlooks for above-normal, normal, and below-normal seasonal rainfall and temperature for specific regions and countries, issued months in advance of the coming season. Nigerian agribusinesses planning seed procurement volumes, fertilizer orders, and staffing for the planting season can use seasonal forecast data to make probabilistic supply chain decisions rather than planning based only on historical averages. Drought monitoring indices from Climate in Africa include the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), and Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) for Nigerian regions. These indices provide objective measures of drought severity on various timescales — 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months — enabling Nigerian agricultural agencies, food security organizations like WFP and FAO operating in Nigeria, and humanitarian NGOs to track developing drought conditions in the drought-prone northern states months before crop failure manifests visibly. Climate risk profiling capabilities allow Nigerian users to retrieve comprehensive climate characterization data for any location: mean annual temperature and rainfall, temperature and rainfall seasonality patterns, frequency of extreme events (heat waves, heavy rainfall, drought spells), and climate change trend analysis showing how temperatures and rainfall have shifted over recent decades. Nigerian urban planners, infrastructure engineers, and real estate developers can use climate risk profiles when making long-term investment decisions about location suitability for projects that will operate for 20-30 years under a changing climate. Temperature extremes data documents historical heat wave frequency, intensity, and duration in Nigeria — an increasingly important metric as climate change intensifies heat stress across the country. Nigerian public health departments, outdoor worker safety regulations, and urban heat island mitigation planning can use temperature extremes data to identify the highest-risk areas and periods. Climate in Africa operates a freemium model with a free tier providing access to basic climate profiles and limited historical data, and paid plans unlocking the full historical archive, higher API call volumes, and advanced forecast products. Research institutions and NGOs may access expanded free tiers by describing their use case during registration.