@RONDAL, you are correct that the data is free and one shouldn’t pay for it. But this goes further, because the value in some services is in what they help you DO with that data.
As a pilot with over 1200 flight hours, I learned how to plot every segment of a trip, including wind effects and fuel consumption. Knowing how to do that ensured that I understood my flight plan, could see when it needed adjustments, and could make those adjustments along the way. But in practice, I always built my flight plan online with paid services that would crunch the data on my aircraft, load center-of-gravity, passengers, fuel, route, and wind to spit out a very accurate flight plan in seconds. The value was not in the data, but in the speed, ease and accuracy of the calculations.
In the same way, I could plan out a ride, calculate distance/grade/etc, get wind data from one or more stations, and use math to apply that wind to my aero profile and cycling speed on each segment. But that’s a ton of work! My Wahoo gets data from GPS, the power meter, and other sources, then does all the calculations to give me a single file with all of that, in seconds.
If MyWindSock takes the free wind data and applies it to each segment of my ride file, letting me see the effect on every segment graphically and helping me learn from this data better, that work which the service is doing is certainly adding value. It would take me at least a half-hour to crunch all that data properly for each ride: if MWS saves me 2-3 hours each month by doing calculations for me, then that’s certainly worth $2/month in my value judgment.
Of course, anyone who doesn’t want this granularity in data won’t see value in the service, and that’s OK. But they’re not just regurgitating free data and charging for it.