Effective date: July 19, 2026. These terms apply to the public Thunderstorm Watch website, anonymous ZIP checker, account service, and saved-location monitoring service. Production paid checkout remains disabled during the legal/support launch gate.
Supplemental information, not an official alert service
Thunderstorm Watch is not NOAA, the National Weather Service, the Storm Prediction Center, FEMA, a local authority, or another government service. It provides a convenience view of public data and must not be used as the sole source for emergency or life-safety decisions.
Keep Wireless Emergency Alerts enabled, use NOAA Weather Radio where available, follow local authorities, and consult weather.gov. Email, web pages, maps, networks, upstream feeds, and devices can be delayed, filtered, unavailable, or wrong.
Scope of the public tool
The service checks only Severe Thunderstorm Watches. It does not determine tornado, flood, hurricane, winter-weather, fire, lightning, forecast, radar, or other hazard status. ZIP checks use a centroid rather than an exact address. A verified inactive result means only that a fresh NWS query returned no matching Severe Thunderstorm Watch for that ZIP centroid at that time; it is not an all-clear.
When official data is stale or cannot be verified, the service is designed to report unknown rather than clear. Scheduled monitoring targets a two-minute poll cadence but does not guarantee that cadence, delivery time, or uninterrupted operation. It uses one national NWS Severe Thunderstorm Watch collection per poll, validated official-zone intersections first, official geometry only when zones are indeterminate, and then a bounded official point fallback if needed. Incomplete unrelated coverage can block a clear result but cannot erase a proven watch match. Location health is degraded after five minutes without a fresh check and unavailable after fifteen minutes. It requires two consecutive fresh authoritative absences before reporting a tracked watch ended. No system is error-free, and users remain responsible for following official alerts.
Accounts and passwordless access
Eligible accounts use a one-time email link. Opening the confirmation page does not sign anyone in; the user must explicitly press the confirmation button before the 15-minute token is atomically consumed. Sessions use a rolling 30-day lifetime: normal authenticated app use may renew the server and browser expiry together no more than once per 24 hours. Sessions can be revoked at any time. You are responsible for access to the email account used for sign-in and for promptly deleting or securing a device you no longer control.
Pro subscription terms
If production checkout is explicitly enabled, the v1 offer is $29 USD per year, charged annually and automatically renewing until canceled, for supplemental email monitoring of up to five saved US ZIP locations. A paused location still occupies one of the five slots until deleted. The service covers Severe Thunderstorm Watches only and does not guarantee uptime, exact polling cadence, or delivery. There is no free trial or coupon.
Ordinary cancellation through the dedicated Stripe billing portal stops automatic renewal and preserves eligible access through the already-paid period. A failed renewal receives a seven-day grace period; if unresolved, monitoring eligibility pauses. Billing status is controlled by verified Stripe subscription state, not by a success-page visit.
Deleting an account is separate from ordinary cancellation. If the subscription has current or future paid access, deletion requires explicit acknowledgement that Thunderstorm Watch will request immediate Stripe cancellation and remaining paid access will end. These terms do not promise a refund. Approved customer-facing refund language must be presented before production checkout opens.
Buying Pro does not enroll the subscriber in marketing or daily engagement email. Operational account, billing, monitoring-enabled/paused, and watch start/material-update/end email can be delayed, filtered, suppressed after a known permanent recipient failure, unavailable, or arrive after official alerts. It does not use open-tracking pixels. A saved location may show unknown whenever the latest official data or scheduled polling health cannot be verified; unknown is not an all-clear.
Acceptable use
You may use the public checker and your own eligible account for personal and reasonable organizational orientation. You may not deliberately overload the service or upstream providers, bypass abuse controls, scrape at harmful volume, probe for unauthorized access, interfere with another account, submit malicious content, or use the service to misrepresent yourself as an official weather authority.
Access may be limited to protect the service, providers, or other users.
Third-party services
The service depends on Cloudflare, Stripe, NOAA/NWS/SPC, IEM, Zippopotam, OpenStreetMap infrastructure, and self-hosted Umami. Their availability and policies can affect the service. Stripe hosts checkout and billing management when enabled; Cloudflare provides account storage and transactional-email transport.
Official source content belongs to its respective public agency or provider. Map and other attribution remains with the named contributors.
Disclaimer and limitation
The service is provided on an as-available basis without a promise that every page, query, map, notification, or provider response will be continuous, timely, or error-free. To the extent permitted by applicable law, Thunderstorm Watch is not responsible for decisions made in place of official alerts or for losses caused by relying on this supplemental service as an emergency-warning system.
Nothing in these terms limits rights that cannot legally be limited.
Changes and contact
Terms may be updated as the product changes. Material paid-product terms will be presented before production checkout is enabled. The current project contact surface is the About page; no public support mailbox is claimed.