Shelters answer where to go. Alerts answer whether you need to move. After Ward 3.0 and 3.1 shipped in the app, builders kept asking a simpler question: can we get that feed without rebuilding the whole ingest?
Yes. That’s Ward for Business.
What it is
Public warning feeds are messy. Different countries, different formats, different languages, overlapping polygons, stale updates. Ward already does the hard part for the app. It ingests CAP feeds from national weather services and civil protection agencies in 140+ countries, dedupes them, geocodes them, classifies severity and hazard type, and translates titles and instructions into 18 languages.
The Business API exposes that same stream as one JSON contract. Ask by point and radius, or by bounding box, and you get active official warnings back: severity, category, instructions, GeoJSON geometry. Reference docs, a playground and the OpenAPI spec are at docs.wardalerts.com.
There’s a free trial (1,000 requests a month), paid tiers for more throughput, history and translations, and RapidAPI if your team prefers marketplace billing.
Who it’s for
Not every product should run its own worldwide alert pipeline. Travel and mobility apps that want destination risk. Logistics teams rerouting around floods and storms. Insurance and duty-of-care tools that need to know the moment a warning covers an asset or a person. Newsrooms that want structured official warnings instead of scraped rumor. Smart home and IoT devices that should react when a tornado or heat warning lands.
If your product’s question is “is there an official warning here right now?”, this is the layer I wish had existed when we started Ward.
What it isn’t
It’s not a substitute for local emergency services, and it’s not a scraped social feed. It’s official warnings, cleaned up. On the consumer side nothing changes: your location in the app stays on your device. The API is for products that already know which place they’re asking about.
Try it
Start with the docs and a trial key. If the trial isn’t the right shape, email api@wardalerts.com. The app itself is still free on iOS and Android, and the longer story is on the Ward page.