How Two Ski Bums Built OpenSnow Into a 500K-Strong Snow App
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- OpenSnow is an independent snow-forecasting app that combines free government weather models (NOAA, GFS, Euro, Canadian, German, Japanese) with its own in-house AI model called METEOS to deliver mountain-specific predictions for any GPS point on the globe.
- Bryan Allegretto and Joel Gratz bootstrapped the company from a 37-person email list to roughly 500,000 followers after Allegretto gave up his site for free in 2010 to join forces, while a third forecaster, Evan Thayer in Utah, declined the same offer.
- Allegretto described himself as "F-list famous," noting the entire OpenSnow forecasting team is men, and said the app's edge comes from forecasters actually living in small mountain towns rather than working from city TV studios.
- METEOS, built around 2018, automated what was previously a manual grind — Allegretto used to hand-key snowfall reports for every resort, a process that took hours each morning.
- The 2024–25 winter has been "one of the weirder on record," the source notes: the West saw deadly avalanches and one of the fastest melts in memory, with California resorts already shutting down, while the East enjoyed rare deep, endless snowfall.
- Allegretto's origin story traces from storm-chasing as a kid in New Jersey, to a meteorology degree at Kean University and an MBA at Rowan, to moving to Tahoe in 2006 and discovering that local skiers didn't trust generic city-issued forecasts.
Why it matters: OpenSnow has built a half-million-strong user base and a team of microcelebrity forecasters by solving a problem government weather models and TV meteorologists can't: ultra-local, mountain-specific snow forecasts. With winter increasingly volatile — deadly avalanches and record-fast melts in the West this season — independent forecasters living where the snow falls have become the most trusted voice for a generation of powder chasers willing to plan trips around a single app's call.
