25 ms·

Farewell, Google Maps

• ericd 8y ago
  "Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For example we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted." I think this is one of the most important points in the article - the way they handle these pricing changes destroys trust in Google's other business offerings. How can people use Google products and services as a core piece of their infrastructure when they're willing to bump their prices >10x with only a few months of notice? That could literally be a business-ending event, depending on how core that service is to the business. In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. Fortunately, their last (sudden) price bump seems to have allowed the creation of some good alternatives.
  • wwweston 8y ago
    While I've experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than: * shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service * changing your terms of service to forbid an activity that was previously allowed, because someone discovered a use that messed up the price points and the service owners would rather forbid that than offer a reasonable price point allowing it * moving to opaquely metered service potentially with apparently arbitrary levels of financial exposure to the client A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.
    • draw_down 8y ago
      Jacking up the price so far that it becomes prohibitive to actually use, on short notice, isn't much different from shutting it down, is it? In both cases you suddenly can't use the service anymore.
      • tobltobs 8y ago
        Thought the same, there are not many use cases which will be still profitable after this price increase.
        • ajross 8y ago
          Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable. I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes. As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?
          • draw_down 8y ago
            Who is talking about startups, though?
          • cannonedhamster 8y ago
            The article said nothing about making it free, it said that the costs, which were previously in line with competitors, increased by very, very large amounts without any perceived increase in value. Then they looked at options which were commercial offerings which cost dramatically less. They are paying for the service, it's not subsidized or free. It's like you didn't read any of the article.
            • alextheparrot 8y ago
  • zackmorris 8y ago
    Is there something like Amazon or Google shopping with a list of prices for all products through time? Kind of like the Wayback Machine (archive.org) but for products. Maybe having a searchable historical database of everything imaginable and their prices would keep companies honest and prevent price gouging.
    • ryneandal 8y ago
      Something like a PaaS Price zombie https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360262?
    • dchuk 8y ago
      That's a really neat idea! Maybe include alerting and the ability to "follow" services you use to monitor their prices?
    • rmorey 8y ago
      This exists for Amazon products: camelcamelcamel.com
    • jiveturkey 8y ago
      camelcamelcamel (.com)
    • Danieru 8y ago
      In Japan there is a site called kakaku.com which maintains graphs for historical prices. We used it to great effect when buying a combo washer and dryer.
    • lloydde 8y ago
      I find a good site like every few years, but they always disappear. My guess is there is more (some) money in B2B.
  • matte_black 8y ago
    On the other hand, if you are a business making real money, these price changes are no big deal. This happens all the time. Where some people see a sob story, I see a competitor getting stamped out.
  • 6cd6beb 8y ago
    >In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. ianal and all that, but isn't somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent? I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that'd be pretty illegal.
    • asadlionpk 8y ago
      Don't Uber and Amazon do that already?
      • neospice 8y ago
        And WalMart.
      • rickycook 8y ago
        i think uber at least (not that i want to defend anything they do) is different, because they don’t have low rates to smother their competition; they have low introductory rates to attract riders and drivers to the service unsure if that’s also predatory pricing? seems different to me
        • smileysteve 8y ago
          > they don’t have low rates to smother their competition Whether their competition is Lyft, Taxis, or public transportation, their subsidized pricing is a big factor to their customers.
        • richardhod 8y ago
          Just because they have a nice PR-friendly story to tell doesn't make the pricing any less predatory. The point of predatory pricing is to attract people to the service, to shut down competition.
      • everybodyknows 8y ago
  • C7H8N4O2 8y ago
    > In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. There was a related discussion[0] on HN a few weeks ago that I found enlightening. Commentator ucaetano's phrasing of the strategy was "create a desert of profitability around you". The discussion of moats vs deserts found here [1] is also useful. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17047348 "Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement" [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17048492 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17048492
    • ucaetano 8y ago
      Ha, that was me! Thanks for the bump!
    • komali2 8y ago
      Almost every conversation I've had with someone working at a startup in this city inevitably turns to the "so, are you worried Google will simply start offering your service for free?" I remember like 3 or 4 years ago having this conversation at a hackathon with a bunch of "Machine Learning" / "Sentiment Analysis" APIs present... right as google started offering both for free on their cloud platform.
      • ucaetano 8y ago
        Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.
        • imron 8y ago
          Being bought/aquihired by Google/others seems to be a business model several companies aim for.
          • sullyj3 8y ago
            A lot of the time they have enough in house talent to not need to
  • bassman9000 8y ago
    In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. Ah, the classic Oracle trick. Good to see the tradition is alive.
  • foobarbazetc 8y ago
    Google did something similar with Stackdriver logging, where they went from a generous free tier to an insanely expensive $.50/Gb in roughly 2-3 months. Very annoying. Especially because by default every GCP service logs a bunch of crap to Stackdriver. Our log cost was going to be as high as our compute cost.
    • Vendan 8y ago
      They've got easy to use exclusions that eliminate the cost if you don't want the logs (and can be pretty picky about what to exclude, even to the point of doing percentage exclusions) and they announced it in advance and pushed the date back a few times. My issue is with devs that write software that spits out a couple of gigs an hour and refuse to trim it down or exclude things.
    • twistedpair 8y ago
      Diane Greene must be trying to build a profitable operation.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • flukus 8y ago
    > In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick It seems like they haven't learned anything at all. Sure it was google that shafted them in this case, but the problem isn't google, it's that their business is entirely dependent on a third party who has the power to do this. They rejected the option that would have prevented this from happening in the future with another company. Oracle probably has a sales team on the way to their offices now.
  • apatters 8y ago
    The pricing change is understandably very frustrating for users of Google Maps who are affected, but it seems like a big win to me for everyone in the mapping market. Google is trading away a monopoly position (and related regulatory risk) in exchange for increased revenue so it's a win for them. It's a win for other mappers because now they can compete on price. It's a win for users because they are getting more choice.
    • rurban 8y ago
      But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.
      • jhall1468 8y ago
        > But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase. We won't see price changes by any of these companies. They all want to be #1.
        • jehlakj 8y ago
          When you have a service that’s ten times cheaper than the best service, people start to raise eyebrows. They perceive it to be much worse. It isn’t always true, but it’s not uncommon either. I doubt companies are going to race to the bottom.
          • Xixi 8y ago
            In the context of a business building a service around it, a mapping service is not a consumer product. Superficial perception only go so far until it is debunked by careful scrutiny. I would certainly hope that a startup deciding to build a service relying on a map provider would test, and measure quantitatively how good the service is before choosing to build their business on top of it...
  • stevefan1999 8y ago
    Remember when Google once said “Don’t be evil” as their motto? Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil. But on the other hand, I think it is necessary, because at the end of the day Google is still a company that needs to make money and most importantly compete with each other, I’m really disappointed at Google to abuse their trust to hurt others.
    • cbolton 8y ago
      Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil What do you mean it's evil? People call Google evil for so many things that are hardly evil at all, that the word has lost its meaning in the context of Google. For example I honestly cannot tell if you're calling them evil for increasing Maps pricing (thereby hurting maps-consuming startups) or for previously asking a low price (thereby hurting startups that offer maps).
      • fdsak 8y ago
        Probably for not showing consistency :)
    • Zooper 8y ago
      That motto was removed some years ago: people using to too much to call them out.
  • hoffs 8y ago
    If you are relying on other services that heavily, it sounds like you didn't have such a great business to start with
    • PDoyle 8y ago
      Ever worked at a startup?
    • Dannymetconan 8y ago
      The only alternative would be to develop everything in house and to purchase and run your own servers.
    • unreal37 8y ago
      Google was subsidizing their startup. Makes sense that they have to pay at least something.
  • chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Re: "...is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor..." I was under the impression the trust for Google evaporated a long time ago. Sure, alternatives can be few at times. But anyone committed to and in bed with Google has to be sleeping with one eye open.
  • mnutt 8y ago
    Having interacted with the Google Maps sales team, I would imagine these posts are a result of these companies hopping on a sales call expecting something ‘google’-like and are surprised that the Oracle sales team is on the call. The value extraction mentality was a bit surprising compared to the image the rest of google presents.
  • amorousf00p 8y ago
    Why you cannot trust this model 101: because it's practitioners understand the value of the labor/product, capitalize on the OSS ideal and then push it to the unsuspecting. I don't know how many bait and switch episodes from google I need to see but by 2008 I was done with them -- for the first time. Ad-nauseam. If you boycotted and didn't use Google they would wither and die and stop being something to worry about: for immediate google specific free offerings that are sucker bait. Also for self aggrandizing standards/inclusions and buying the overt talent. But whatever. The HN community is full of dupes and buy ins, culture whores and fifth columnists. True belief in OSS died when everyone else took it and got rich.
• abduhl 8y ago
  Is this price increase imposed on X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.?
  • adamrezich 8y ago
    I'm sure it is, but they can afford it...
    • abduhl 8y ago
      This is actually my real question: can these companies afford it? If a company has X months of runway and their Maps costs just went up by a factor of 11 then Google may have just gone from "less than payroll" to "more expensive than our devs". Is this Google trying to move into a new space?
      • izacus 8y ago
        Do you really think you can just jumpstart a project like Google Maps with a few devs?!
        • abduhl 8y ago
          My question is pointed at companies that rely on Google Maps, not Maps itself. If a company is spending 80% of their cash on HR related items and 20% on miscellaneous infrastructure costs (hosting, Maps API access, etc) with 25% of that misc cost being maps then monthly expenditures just increased by ~23% (and runway decreased by ~19%)
  • ericd 8y ago
    Users at that scale typically have an enterprise plan which is handled differently (you have an account manager rather than using Google's API console billing), and pricing is totally different. It's been a while since I had a GMaps enterprise plan, though, so I'm not sure if they're bumping the pricing on that side. At the time, the pricing was closer to the new prices they're rolling out than they were to the old API console billing prices.
• Mariehane 8y ago
  I wonder if this price hike has anything to do with the EU antitrust fine Google received recently.
  • izacus 8y ago
    The price increase was announced (and implemented) a few months ago.
  • CrlNvl 8y ago
    No, the price hike was decided several months ago, see http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-maps-api-insane-price-hike/ http://geoawesomeness.com/developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...
  • equasar 8y ago
    I'm pretty is a percent of the reason why they decided this absurd price increase.
    • Moru 8y ago
      Thats ok, there are plenty of other ways to get a free map and analytics on your homepage. And the added benefit of not handing your users data over to google. Planned for first thing after the vacation.
• wyldfire 8y ago
  > OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Not if I understand their terms correctly [1] [2]. Maybe there's a distinction between the terms of the map data itself and the software published to interact with it? [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright [2] https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/ https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/summary/
  • izacus 8y ago
    IIRC that's for the openstreetmap.org site, which wasn't built to answer queries from hundreds of commercial apps (like Maps API is). You're supposed to copy and deploy the dataset on your own servers so you don't burn bandwidth of the OSM project.
    • ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      There's some other options too for people who want to use OSM data, but avoid deploying it themselves. One of the ones I discovered is that MapQuest (which it doesn't look like they considered) offers OSM data and APIs as an option alongside the MapQuest proprietary data and APIs: https://developer.mapquest.com/documentation/open/ https://developer.mapquest.com/documentation/open/ And there's several other places that offer this as well. So the advantage of building on OSM data and APIs potentially is that you could switch providers without losing API compatibility or having the data available change out from under you.
      • Groxx 8y ago
        MapQuest seems like it might be 6x more expensive than the others listed in the post, if "transactions" are the same concept: https://developer.mapquest.com/plans https://developer.mapquest.com/plans ($100 for 30,000 transactions) (transactions aren't defined anywhere I can easily find tho, so it's possible this isn't correct. but I don't really mind prematurely concluding that they're significantly more expensive if they don't clearly describe their pricing system.)
• chadlavi 8y ago
  TIL there is a paid API for google maps, I just assumed it was free to use. Seems pretty nickel-and-dimey.
  • dokem 8y ago
    Consider, for a moment, how much value a company like Uber gets from the Google Maps API.
    • chadlavi 8y ago
      Charging large partners like that makes sense, but the part that seems dumb is charging small businesses and startups at the same rate as behemoths like Uber.
  • lucb1e 8y ago
    You're being downvoted, but it's important that people read this comment. The vast majority of Google Maps users helpfully do everything Google asks of them, not realizing that they are contributing towards a monopoly that is definitely not free to use for anything other than personal use. Or might even find it fair that they can piggyback on other people's paid usage (see also: Dropbox).
• zakk 8y ago
  Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls?
  • ethelward 8y ago
    Totally. You also have business offering an API to OSM data that they mirror and host themselves. The limitation is for the openstreetmap.org website, that is not dimensioned to be heavily used.
  • rmc 8y ago
    > Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls? Yes, plenty of people do that. Be careful "OpenStreetMap API" is only for editing. There is other software in the OSM ecosystem which has it's own API (e.g. graphhopper has an API for routing). But sometimes people get confused and try to use the "OSM [editing] API" for all sorts of things.
• b212 8y ago
  There's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs. They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing). Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (sic!): https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gdziepolek.pl%2Fblog%2Fpozegnanie-z-google-maps&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js=y&prev... Looks like many folks who leeched on GM's free plan will move to alternatives so maybe this dick move will turn around and became actually a good thing, would love to see more competition in the area and right now Google Maps is years ahead of competition: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
  • edgarvaldes 8y ago
    This thread is precisely about that company
    • tartrate 8y ago
      It's a good TL;DR of the article but I'm not sure it's intentional :)
  • hughes 8y ago
    Pretty sure you linked to the same article that we're discussing here.
  • pkaye 8y ago
    > They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month... How much of that $1300 is based on getting some freebies or low pices by staying below some usage threshold? Will they come upon additional costs on other services as they scale up?
  • qwert-e 8y ago
    Wow, people really do just read headlines nowadays...
• RestlessMind 8y ago
  > Importantly, prices are the same from US to the Africa, despite the fact that revenue generation is vastly different in most developed countries compared to the others. This can be understood in two ways: 1. Cost of serving is the same from US to Africa (datacenters, network bandwidth, engineering etc), so prices are same 2. If #1 results in less adoption from developing countries, it is okay because they are not the focus anyway (i.e. SV companies are focussed on US/EU markets first). So getting rid of non-revenue making chunk of traffic doesn't hurt much.
  • supernova87a 8y ago
    Yeah, if Google had differential pricing for something that costs them the same to produce, I'm sure you would soon find innovative middlemen who make it their business to source the Maps from lower cost priced countries to higher ones. Just like travel agents or passengers find ways to take cheaper flights from countries or city pairs that airlines price differently to help capture more market, even though it doesn't cost them very different to provide the service.
    • matt4077 8y ago
      Any such middlemen would certainly be breaking the terms of their contract with google, and possibly copyright law. If they were willing and able to do so, they could already make a fortune by reselling Google Maps data. Since that does not happen, I have doubts regarding your scenario.
    • nickodell 8y ago
      That would be true if the pricing were based on the business's location, but not if the pricing were based on the map's location. If you say that you're in Khartoum when you're actually in New York, you won't get a very useful map back.
  • ethbro 8y ago
    #2 seems shortsighted as a business model. Where your unit cost for a product is essentially negligible (amortized against other GM customers and GCP scale infrastructure), why would you decrease exposure in a potential growth market? The business answer is "because offering discounts cannibalizes revenue from higher-margin markets." But in this case... you literally know exactly where the user is located.
• zylepe 8y ago
  This mentions Apple mapkit js. This is the first I’ve seen of that. Has anyone used it before? I’m wary of building anything on a proprietary JavaScript api, but if they provide tiles that can be used in leaflet or mapbox gl it might be an attractive option.
  • xenadu02 8y ago
    MapKit JS allows 250,000 instantiations and 25,000 service calls per day on the free tier. Currently you must have a paid developer account to use MapKit JS. Beyond that use this form to request an increase in your limit: https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/mapkitjs/ https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/mapkitjs/ As for pricing, nothing has been announced at this time.
    • dmortin 8y ago
      How much does the developer account cost?
      • Jerry2 8y ago
        $99/year. https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/ https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/
        • dmortin 8y ago
          I don't get it why they ask for money from people who want to learn their platform. They should be happy more people want to develop for them and charge for actual API usage instead above the free quota.
          • Jerry2 8y ago
            You can do pretty much everything with free membership: free tools etc. If you want to sell stuff in the App Store, then you have to pay.
• pjungwir 8y ago
  I have a native Android app I need to update before Thanksgiving. Right now the map uses Google Play Services. I've done fairly deep OpenStreetMap projects on several websites, but with Android I'm afraid what it will mean to find a Google alternative. What are other people doing there?
  • izacus 8y ago
    Displaying maps on Android remains free... so I guess people are doing nothing?
    • pjungwir 8y ago
      Okay. I've read that in a few places, but never anything that seemed quite clear and authoritative enough to really trust it. For instance Google's docs [1] say: In addition to the $200 monthly free credit, all users get: Free Maps usage for iOS, Android, and Embed (for displaying maps only) But in a section about Dynamic Maps and Street View they also say: This change affects the following Google Maps Platform APIs: Maps JavaScript API, Maps Static API, Street View API, Maps SDK for Android, and Maps SDK for iOS. So are maps on Android only free if the user can't interact with them? [1] https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-changes/ https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch...
• finnwolff 8y ago
  does anyone know if this development will affect users of MapKit that hosts Google Maps within an iOS app? I've been using Google Maps through this SDK for over a year and haven't heard anything about them charging for the service or being able to track usage as one scales.
  • spaceflunky 8y ago
    Nope. Pretty sure usage through the SDK remains free
    • mthoms 8y ago
      For now.
• seshagiric 8y ago
  It's strange they haven't tried Bing Maps (differnt than Azure maps), it has a much rich web control and support for Javascript which per the article was one of the selection criteria.
  • partiallypro 8y ago
    I've tried using Bing Maps for clients and they always complain and want Google. Maybe with the pricing increases that will begin to change. Google Maps lacks any real competition. Sure there's Here, and Apple Maps, and Bing...but none of them are -serious- competitors.
  • dmortin 8y ago
    Bing maps does not publish pricing info AFAIK. Last time I checked it said contact sales, no price was given.
• zylepe 8y ago
  This talks mostly about road map tiles. Has anyone found any good options for satellite image tiles? Mapbox resells DigitalGlobe imagery but would cost over $1k/month for my site so I’m looking for an alternative with more attractive pricing options
  • vinnieman232 8y ago
    Hi Zylepe! Disclosure, I work at Mapbox, but wanted to point you towards our Satellite Streets tiles which combine many different data sources (including DG), but also contain high-resolution flyover imagery in larger urban areas in the USA. https://www.mapbox.com/maps/satellite/ https://www.mapbox.com/maps/satellite/ What did you use to calculate your $1k price/month estimate for your website?
    • zylepe 8y ago
      Thanks! The quality is great but I need around 250k 512x512 satellite tile loads per day so 250k / (4 tiles per “view”) * (30 days per month) - (50k free requests per month) * ($0.50 per 1000 views) = $912.50 per month. Is my understanding correct?
• bambax 8y ago
  It's not hard to produce your own tiles from OpenStreetMap data and serve them from your own server using something as Leaflet. If you only need to show maps, and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if), this is the way to go. What is very hard is coming up for a replacement of either geocoding/reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don't really work or are quite difficult to setup (IMHO). Best of luck!
  • zylepe 8y ago
    I had very good luck with graphhopper for routing. On digitalocean it costs about $10 to process planet.osm and the server can run on as small as a $40/month droplet. I am having trouble finding a good autocomplete/geo search solution though, curious if anyone has found a decent quality provider or solution you can self host like graphhopper.
    • Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
      Photon is the most popular autocomplete solution. Runs fine on an SSD and there are pre-built database dumps you can download. Obviously OSM's address coverage isn't great, which is always going to be the limitation.
  • ddoolin 8y ago
    I'd think you can cache results of geocoding either direction as their results should hardly change. Not sure of the usage model but if it involves repeated look ups, this should be OK if it doesn't break any terms.
  • lucb1e 8y ago
    > and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if) Same for Google Maps: https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160 https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160 Most of us here are from reasonably rich countries, and here Google is always fine, while OSM is usually fine (but not always). I am curious if you compare a few hundred random populated places on earth, how they compare. Where it is not economical to create a map, as in the tweet above, Google Maps is terrible. OSM is more often terrible in a country where they have just enough money to be worth it to Google, but where OSM just didn't happen to catch on among local mappers. You only need a few dozen for a country of a few million. The Netherlands is truly the best country on OSM that I know of: 100% road and address coverage, and there are always people who love to jump on new things like a new bridge or tunnel. Somehow almost all the cyclepaths, trails, etc. are also on there. Turns out, a grand total of 65 monthly active users maintain it. I was very surprised. Apparently it doesn't take that much to maintain the map. If we get a few hundred people to work on OSM once a month in a given country of average size, it seems that you can maintain a map of a quality higher than Google Maps, at a tiny fraction of the cost (look at the expenses of the OSM Foundation), while being objective and free for everyone (scientists, businesses, consumers) to use.
• woohoo7676 8y ago
  I work for a startup that has mapping/routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google's mapping APIs was too great and decided to work on having a switchable backup provider in case something like this should ever happen. With auto complete especially, we would have had a 10-20x increase in pricing (and this is with an 'enterprise' plan pricing). As the article says, we were basically given 2 months notice for an enormous price hike that would likely render the business untenable. Luckily we were able to put our backup plan into action, but changes like this really erode the confidence to use Google (at least for mapping) in the future unfortunately.
  • ethbro 8y ago
    Any details on how complicated enabling that switchability was? Or details / costs / takeaways from your process? Seems like now would be a great time to write a blog post on how you did it. :)
    • woohoo7676 8y ago
      It definitely took a decent amount of work (and a double decent amount of testing). As voltagex_ mentioned, most location providers have a different API flow than Google Maps - rather than doing a total abstraction of providers (which would take too much effort), we went for a Google flow and non-Google flow basically. For example, location autocomplete with Google requires a two step process (call for suggestions, then call for details of the suggestion) where a couple alternative apis provided the necessary data in the suggestion process. This requires a bit of a different flow on the server/client, so building support for both in was one of the hurdles we had to get over. As for other takeaways, I guess mainly always have a backup plan for mission-critical service providers :)
  • voltagex_ 8y ago
    Writing a mapping abstraction layer is tricky - mostly because Google Maps does things differently than other providers. Can you share any details?
    • 8y ago
• alrex021 8y ago
  In our own experience, we pleaded the fact that those dollar figures are just beyond workable if you consider the fact that we come from a developing country and we're faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).
  • bflesch 8y ago
    If you get into trouble with your unit economics given such a raise, then you really need to think about your business model. How much value is your business really creating ON TOP of the maps? I don't want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don't think enough about this issue of value creation.
    • alrex021 8y ago
      A 20x jump on the monthly charge, especially in lower margin business, will hurt whichever way you look at it, IMHO.
      • bflesch 8y ago
        That's exactly what I was suggesting: If you are stuck in a low margin business and see that a provider such as google is screwing up your margins, you should really try to work on another idea which has higher margins. Working on a low margin business is a choice! You can always ditch it and try to find something with higher margins (= higher value created for users).
        • Symbiote 8y ago
          Did you miss where they wrote "a developing country"? There are places where a software developer's good salary is $10,000 a year. Google doesn't need to provide a service in that country, but it's understandable that a 20× increase is going to hit harder than in a wealthy country.
          • 8y ago
• kirchhoff 8y ago
  It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative. I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month. Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been reaching out to such entities individually, offering their 'premium plan' service. The pricing for the (old) premium plan was remarkably similar to the new pricing which now applies to everyone. This pricing change has ended the era of Google Maps mashups / hobby projects.
  • nicoboo 8y ago
    You're right about the Street View feature that is currently a true key diferenciator that has not a lot of competition in terms of availability and coverage. Though, Mapillary is quite interesting but their pricing model is not really comparable to Google's one: https://www.mapillary.com/pricing https://www.mapillary.com/pricing
  • snarf21 8y ago
    I think there is a different reason for charging for StreetView. The need to make their money back and quick. Self driving cars will have cameras that will give reasonable results for a lot of use cases (maybe not 360 but who cares). It is also a potential combo monetization strategy for the autonomous vendor.
    • CodeWriter23 8y ago
      The standard license prohibits use in autonomous vehicles. Para 2.e https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html
      • matwood 8y ago
        I think the comment you replied to was saying that StreetView will soon be commodotized, so they need to make the money back now.
• mapperguy 8y ago
  A lot of people forget that Mapbox did a similar move with their $499/mo price hike for commercial apps + pay as you go. Then later they simply switched all of their old users to the new pricing. Not to mention when I called to ask about Enterprise pricing years ago, it was $7,500/yr. 9 months later it became $25,000/yr. I have no trust in neither Google Maps nor Mapbox.
• anonytrary 8y ago
  Don't be evil.
• pauldbau 8y ago
  We used to use Skobbler, which was great until they basically stopped working and went silent. For the past 18 months, we've used Thunderforest (it's an OpenStreetMap PaaS) and they're great. Solid uptime, good maps and the pricing is amazingly good. Andy - the guy who runs it - is super helpful and can also put together custom map styles (which we've taken up).
• beerlord 8y ago
  I think the GDPR and EU fine is going to trigger Google - and perhaps other large American tech companies - to actually start charging for services, now that our personal data cannot be so easily sold. Google has been enjoying huge profits, so is probably setting the pricing on those services at the level required to maintain those profits. I think what we will see in the maps arena is multiple-country specific maps sites popping up, like a map site specific to Poland for example. Physical businesses will then have a real hassle making sure they have a presence on ~10 different mapping sites, instead of just Google Maps. Ironically it will make getting around Europe more difficult. I have lived in Poland and there are a lot of business absent from Google Maps, and a lot of cities not present on Google Maps transit.
  • majewsky 8y ago
    I'm just as in favor of GDPR as you, but I shall reserve my cheers for when the first actual GPDR fines are handed out. For now, I'm mostly seeing annoyed SMEs on one side who go to ridiculous lengths to be compliant in the face of missing precedents. And on the other side, big internet corps are implementing joke consent pages with tons of dark patterns that clearly go against the spirit of the regulation. I think they're pretty certain that they will eventually be fined, but they've done the math and found that milking customer data for the X years until the first fines are imposed is more profitable than complying now and not risking a fine.
    • beerlord 8y ago
      I'm not really a fan of GDPR actually. I think advertising has its place, and the more targeted it is, the better the results for everyone. The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook, which is more of a problem with America's campaign financing (non)restrictions than anything (and probably the fact that the candidate who used it was quite anti-establishment). What the internet is missing though is an alternate funding mechanism. When I visit a site I indirectly give the owner something like $0.002 (0.2 cents) worth of bucks from advertisers who show things to me. Why can't I just pay the website that as a microtransaction directly? Transaction fees would eat it all - but aggregated enough, and perhaps as part of a $10/month 'internet content subscription', it could work in the way that Spotify does.
• bflesch 8y ago
  I think it is positive that google finally reaches a sane price point with maps. As the comparison in the blog post shows, the whole market of map providers looked at what gmaps is charging and kind of went along with a price in the same category. The higher price allows them to actually get paid for the value they provide to various startups, which - as they pointed out in the blog post - would not exist without these maps. Of course, the open source approach of OSM with mostly unpaid volunteers is again able to show its potential. Everyone agrees gmaps has the best data imagery, plus street view - so why not make people pay for it accordingly. I really don't see a problem with this. On top of that people finally receive proper support from google once significant sums are involved.
  • bhhaskin 8y ago
    Here is the problem. When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it. If that doesn't scream antitrust I don't know what else does. Google has grown maps using pretty shady tactics. Their data is only so good due to mining data from all the Android users and I bet Street View has a lot of government money behind it.
    • magicalist 8y ago
      > When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it. Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005? There may have been (and you seem so certain I'm sure you could name them all :P), but it's crazy to claim that there aren't far more competitors in the last 5 years than there were back then. Just look at the article, which is literally about all the competition available.
      • dingo_bat 8y ago
        Nokia maps was pretty decent. They had acquired Navteq, which had been in the business of mapping for decades. When Google maps just used to have a list of driving instructions, Nokia maps had full turn by turn voice navigation. Of course in this case Google maps didn't drive Nokia out of business, that was totally their own doing and maps was just one collateral damage.
• atr2 8y ago
  That email is fake: they have forged the screenshot. In the first paragraph you can clearly see how the typeface changes to something different (starting with "enterprise-grade") Compare these two "g": https://i.imgur.com/8Ja6pl2.png https://i.imgur.com/8Ja6pl2.png I've archived the post in case they decide to fix their "mistake". https://archive.is/w2swh https://archive.is/w2swh
  • GenericsMotors 8y ago
    Compression artifact maybe? Doesn't seem likely they'd risk their reputation by faking correspondence with Google and publishing it in the open.
  • ripdog 8y ago
    Couldn't that be subpixel anti-aliasing? Besides that, there's nothing difficult to believe about that experience with google. And besides THAT, there's a far more trivial method of 'forging' an email - using the devtools to modify the DOM. No need to bust out photoshop at all. Your accusation makes no sense and is based on almost nothing.
    • atr2 8y ago
      No, it's not subpixel anti-aliasing. It's a completely different font. It looks like Roboto to me, while the rest of the email is written using Helvetica. DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did. This email is FORGED, and I'd like to know why.
      • Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
        If you’re going to manipulate the DOM (typically via the dev console) it seems vanishingly unlikely you’d insert a new span with a different font rather than just overtyping the text.
        • atr2 8y ago
• dom96 8y ago
  Google really needs to stop treating their customers and users so badly. Slightly offtopic: I have been trying to get Google to fix the location of my flat on Maps for years now. I have reported it multiple times to them and it is still unfixed. Does anyone know a more direct way I can get in touch with them?
  • lucb1e 8y ago
    Try openstreetmap.org, there user contributions are always welcome :)
    • dom96 8y ago
      Yes, I already made modifications on it. As far as I can tell openstreetmap is the only map that successfully finds the location of my address.
      • lucb1e 8y ago
        Always the same. Especially when TomTom satnavs were commonplace and you had to pay for map updates, nobody could ever find your house if you lived in a new area, or if there were new roads in the area. Recently they built a new tunnel here, it took a few months before friends and family stopped complaining about Google leading them wrong. Meanwhile I use OsmAnd and have no trouble anywhere (when driving in western Europe). Or if I forgot to update my map, then I can still figure out my way by looking at the roads tagged as "currently being built" on my version of the map. OSM really is just power to the people.
• joshe 8y ago
  Apple's web mapping free tier is huge: Apple 250K map views / *day* Mapbox 50K map views / month Google ($200 credit buys you) 28k dynamic map views / month Once it comes out of beta, I'm guessing their pricing will be pretty aggressive too.
  • lucb1e 8y ago
    And for OpenStreetMap, the cost might be negligible depending on how often you want updates and how large an area you want to cover: for a small area, you can generate tiles once a year or so and just have static hosting serve them up. According to another comment in this thread who hosts a tile server him/herself on DigitalOcean, that costs about $40. Doesn't seem terrible even for a startup, either.
  • dmortin 8y ago
    Doesn't Apple's map require a developer account which costs money? I haven't used them, but I seem to remember you have to pay to develop using Apple products.
    • Jerry2 8y ago
      >Doesn't Apple's map require a developer account which costs money? $100 seems like a bargain compared to those other options.
• patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Wonder if a company like Garmin will be jumping into the market given Google's behavior.
  • lucb1e 8y ago
    I wonder when we realize that, whoever the current big guy is, having a single company be the big guy means they can pull this kind of crap. There are two ways to avoid this: have multiple good options at any given time (and make it easy to switch), or have a non-commercial entity be the main source of data. My inner hacker wants the latter, but I guess either would be okay.
• linsomniac 8y ago
  I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built the next night after tuning some CartoCSS for our needs. We already have our own aerial tiles, built off the free NAIP imagery, and I just went through rebuilding the 2017 NAIP tiles last week to make them higher quality and fix some seam issues. This combination is pretty good and lets us take control of our map tile destiny. References I used in setting things up: https://github.com/zavpyj/osm-tiles-docker https://github.com/zavpyj/osm-tiles-docker https://switch2osm.org/ https://switch2osm.org/ https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/tile-server-ubuntu/ https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/tile-server-ubu...
  • spapas82 8y ago
    I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources. Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04... (yes they are for Ubuntu but you'll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don't really need it, I recommend trying it to understand how it works; it has some very intuitive ideas. Beyond the tile server I am also proposing GeoServer (http://geoserver.org http://geoserver.org) for hosting the geo points on the maps (it can integrate with PostGIS and various other datasources and output the geo points in various different formats). You can then use Leaflet (https://leafletjs.com https://leafletjs.com) to actually display the map and points!
    • linsomniac 8y ago
      Tile generation wasn't THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using "render_list_geo.pl"). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles. Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  And the squeeze to shore up revenue continues. It does really hurt to have your business tied to someone else's api. This will continue to damage startups as the big companies deal with eroding search revenue
• axx 8y ago
  We switched from Google Maps to OpenMapTiles for the same reason. Running OpenMapTiles via Docker was pretty easy. We bought a license for the Tiles (Europe) and it was a one time fee only.
  • prideout 8y ago
    Interesting, you had to purchase a license for the tiles? I thought that OpenMapTiles were "open".
    • MattBlissett 8y ago
      They're under something like a non-commercial license. Three parts of a map are copyrightable. The map data is © OpenStreetMap under their open license, but OpenMapTiles claim copyright on the cartography of their tiles — since they aren't an exact copy of OSM, they decide what to filter for each zoom level, what to simplify for performance and so on. Additionally, if you choose to use it, a map style is copyright: the design of showing motorways in blue at 4px and cycle paths in green, for example. For the tiles you see on OpenStreetMap.org, all three parts are under open licenses. (And there are decisions at all three levels, for example OSM's database contains the water features you see at OpenSeaMap.org, but doesn't render them.) https://openmaptiles.com/terms/ https://openmaptiles.com/terms/
    • lucb1e 8y ago
      The data is open and can be downloaded from the donation-run OpenStreetMap Foundation, and as long as you provide credits you are free to do anything with the data (commercial or otherwise), but if someone makes a custom style and creates tiles (images) from them, then those images are copyrighted.
• megous 8y ago
  > Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors. No. Google maps is an absolute, washed out turd style wise. We have much better local competitor. Compare this: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.081478,14.4272906,13z https://www.google.com/maps/@50.081478,14.4272906,13z https://mapy.cz/zakladni?x=14.4068130&y=50.0892746&z=13 https://mapy.cz/zakladni?x=14.4068130&y=50.0892746&z=13 You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better. Much more detail. Much more contrast. Much more visual information. Tourist version of the maps. I hated using Google maps when traveling in Spain. Sadly they are the recommended way to get public transport info. But I avoid them at all costs. I sometimes print maps when travelling and I can imagine google maps style would be more than useless when printed B/W on a shitty printer, while I could still use mapy.cz maps while low on ink.
  • megous 8y ago
    I could navigate the city with a map printed even at that zoom level, but good luck trying to do that with google maps. That's the single most important point for the map. I didn't consciously try to compare the maps before, but looking at the differences now, google maps seem thoughtless and completely random at what is highlighted, how parts of the city are named (some use names, some numbers, for no reason), what parts are shown and what are not.
    • flukus 8y ago
      One zoom level in from that it shows the names of all the major roads, glorious. With google maps it seems you sometimes have to zoom right in to where a road is half the screen to see the names. I switch to OsmAnd on my phone for exactly this reason.
    • peterburkimsher 8y ago
      I prefer the old style of Google Maps, when roads were marked more clearly. I used MOBAC to get offline cached tiles and use them with Galileo on my iPhone and my own map app on my laptop. There's a theme called OSM Bright that looks good, and when I figure out how to set it up, I plan to switch.
• sweb 8y ago
  Seems like there is a good chance that all of the Google Maps competitors will raise their prices now too (although probably not as substantially), so it doesn't seem like a fair price comparison until all of the dust settles there. They all probably set their price ranges to be inline with Google Maps since that is the most popular product and there are very few reasons why a potential customer would go with a non-Google Maps product if it was more expensive than Google Maps.
• synesso 8y ago
  TallyGo employee here. We have free map impressions for customers of our navigation SDK.
  • voltagex_ 8y ago
    If you're going to promote your product you should probably have a link in your comment. Few things: * Who's your mapping provider? * Why do I need to sign up to even see example code? * Why would I use this over something like MapBox? * What's your accuracy like in Australia?
    • synesso 8y ago
      I'm an employee. It's not my product. I didn't include a link because I thought it would be too spammy. It's tallygo.com. At this time, we are a mix of mapbox + our own data. I don't know why you need to sign up to see sample code. I'll give that feedback. For mapping you'd use it over mapbox because it comes for free with your navigation package. For navigation you'd use it over mapbox because it has better turn-by-turn instructions, routes and traffic estimates. The map is accurate throughout the world. The navigation product is specific to North America at this time, but it will expand.
• linsomniac 8y ago
  This price change doesn't make any sense to me or the people where I work, unless they just want people to stop using Google Maps on other sites. You increase prices over an order of magnitude. You give people warning. You give people credits to cover a few more months without paying extra. What is the end game. If you just want extra revenue, why are you giving them the grace period to switch? Why are you giving service credits to give people another couple months to switch? So if they want people to stop using Google Maps (businesses, not consumers), WHY do they want reduced use? Is there an outside source changing pricing or licensing? I don't think so, I think Google owns the data.
• UncleEntity 8y ago
  I'm kind of unclear on what value they add above just using Google Maps to find a pharmacy? If all they do is repackage Google's data then I don't see Google as being particularly evil in this case, why should they give "the competition" a free ride? I have to guess they do add something (inventory data maybe?) to make it worthy of going to their website though.
  • ericd 8y ago
    From the screenshot, it looks like they offer inventory/pricing for the drug you care about.
• brentadamson 8y ago
  I just got done on the first stages of a maps instant answer for Jive Search using Mapbox and think it's coming along very well. Still have a lot to do in terms of adding directions and triggering the answer with the name of a city, etc but am quite happy with being able to switch from a map view to satellite view easily. Didn't take long to get up and running either. https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch
• martin1975 8y ago
  Google Maps strength is largely due in part to their surveying of roads with those funky looking vehicles I think most of us have seen. If one were to develop an app that could use anyone's GPS to do the same as what Google is paying money for... it could pose a real threat to them. A "crowdsourced" map of sorts..
  • microtherion 8y ago
    Hmm… where have I heard this idea recently? https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
  • Zach_the_Lizard 8y ago
    I think their navigation offering is another strong moat in terms of just plain old maps. I'm sure Google is mining all of that sweet, sweet GPS data from people using their navigation. I can imagine some machine learning of aeriel imagery and some sort of GPS path clustering helps them get a lot of the last mile. Navigation also helps them get real time traffic data and allows them to learn how costly certain road segments are.
  • pwg 8y ago
    Look into OpenStreetCam: https://openstreetcam.org/ https://openstreetcam.org/
• prideout 8y ago
  For the client library, it's interesting that they are bullish on leaflet rather than mapbox-gl-js. After playing with their respective demos, I found that the latter seems much smoother and prettier.
  • aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    Leaflet is the open source base/core version of mapbox-gl-js; they're both maintained by Mapbox people.
• iamleppert 8y ago
  You could always use Leaflet or even d3.geo (or cesium or whatever) and just buy whatever tiles and data you need from the many providers who offer them. You would only need to buy for the areas you service and could buy new tiles annually or when you expand into new areas, just like you do with your car's GPS. You can buy rasters and vector data from so many providers, and actually get a lot higher quality data than Google in some cases (for some areas). This also affords you complete control over the map style, although some providers like Mapbox allow you a lot of control over look and feel via their StyleJSON stuff. Also if it really is such a big part of your product, I don't really think $80 per day (for 15k unique users) as an operational cost is all that much honestly. And if you have a single page app, Google only charges for the first load anyways. They may have greatly increased the prices, but it does reflect the value they are providing and the tone taken in the article comes off as freeloading and ignorant of the effort level and value of providing such a service. People also need to note that Google's javascript framework and embeddable maps is a different product than their maps.google.com, which seems to be higher quality both in the data and the rendering/features. The one they offer to embed on your site appears to be a much older version (for instance it doesn't support smooth zooming or 512x512 tiles). There are also TOS restrictions with what you can do with their javascript framework and widgets/API's, for instance you generally can't use other data providers or features from other mapping/GIS services on the same page.
• rubyn00bie 8y ago
  Having used/managed/dealt Google Maps enterprise product, I can say, it alone has made me _hate_ and not trust Google. These price hikes are laughable... Support forums/forms are buried deep and inaccessible via Google search (or were), and for technical support you're required to use some obscure login to contact someone. People may or may not reply to you in at timely manner, and sales reps don't give a shit about you the second you sign the paper. Problems with their APIs or errors are impossible to get priority for... so you basically pony up many thousands of dollars and you get a product you have to support yourself. Not to mention back in the day the Google Maps JS had a memory leak (we had to write our own pinning layer). ... I will note, I've noticed Google Cloud seems to be better managed with actual semblance of support but it's the only one I've had a good experience with. I recommend Google's services to no one because the support is so abysmal and now the price is too (at least for maps).
  • mxuribe 8y ago
    A big +1 on this one. In a previous role, my organization leveraged google maps enterprise for tons of money, and the support sucked something awful.
• duxup 8y ago
  Just as a n00b who thought the fact that I could make these silly custom maps "OMG look the pins are silly things now!" on Google Maps was super cool... I'm disappointed. I get that anything I do on my own is likely below the threshold.... but at the same time I feel like this likely will somewhat reduce maps usage and what if any bragging rights I might have with an employer (if I can find one ;)). For me I maybe wonder if I'm going to make a hobby app that I should look at alternatives instead, or just quit dorking with Google Maps in my spare time... Granted this is all very individual light stuff, but I wonder if it is a consideration people will have considering how dramatic and sudden the price change has been.
• JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites What does this mean? How did Apple Maps use it?
  • makomk 8y ago
    It means that you're not meant to use their servers to supply your map tiles (basically, image files that cover an area of map). You're supposed to either use one of the commercial tile providers or set up your own tile rendering servers. All the code and data required to produce tiles identical to the ones on openstreetmap.org is open source and freely available so in principle this isn't a big deal. This company just wanted a direct drop-in replacement for Google Maps that didn't require running more of their own servers.
    • lucb1e 8y ago
      > This company just wanted a direct drop-in replacement for Google Maps that didn't require running more of their own servers. All the while complaining about how expensive Google has become. Hosting OSM is definitely cheaper than Google Maps, but it's a little ironic that they didn't consider this alternative solution.
  • rmc 8y ago
    > What does this mean? How did Apple Maps use it? It's not true. Ish. On openstreetmap.org there's servers that render the map data into the images you see. That's run by volunteers, on mostly donated hardware and hosting. There is no SLAs. If you run your big commericial app against that, and cause the load to go through the roof, the volunteer sysadmins will be sad, and will block your app. It's not commerical vs non-commerical. Big non-commerical apps do get blocked for misusing it too. You can download the raw data from ( https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ ) and run your own tileserver and use that commerically. You can use OSM for commerical sites. You cannot use the volunteer hardware on openstreetmap.org for big usage.
• r0m4n0 8y ago
  I’m glad I’m not the only one that has this sentiment. The day that they enabled part of the new quota system my app stopped working (partially my fault for not reading their email) but it turned out to be the day before Election Day for an election app. I call in for support and they tell me that they are rolling out the new quota system and that I have to pay $10,000 if I need to increase my quota limit before the official new quota pay as you go system launches. After the discussion I find out I’m not even talking to google and it was a google partner. Somewhere down the line google just had a partner call me instead. Long story short I changed the API key to get me past Election Day. Decided I’m moving off google maps asap as well. I’m willing to pay but... can’t handle their constantly changing policies, their support was terrible, their ask for $10,000 for a short term slightly increased quota was absurd, their new quota system is too expensive.
• icantdrive55 8y ago
  1. Google offers a free/ low price product. 2. Google raises the price. 3. Entrepreneurs/companies decide to pour money into map products. 4. Google then decided to offer the free product again; because they have the money to spend, and want to get rid of competition. 5. It's time to split up Google's cash cow--yes--the search engine. 6. Google is too powerful now?
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• lucb1e 8y ago
  I would just like to note that while cost is one thing, this is not the only factor based on which we should choose a map. Everyone complains about the huge and sudden increase, so not before long they will lower the prices again and everyone will be happy... and continue to put more money into this already giant player on the market, giving them even more control over it.
• __jal 8y ago
  Google doesn't care about you or whatever you're building, unless you are building something that might threaten them. You would be well-advised to reciprocate. To the extent that third-party services are essential to your survival, making efforts to bring it in-house, get long-term contracts, have backup providers, etc. is simply prudent. Dependency is control. If you build your business in someone else's sandbox, it shouldn't be a surprise that they can hurt you at their whim, and absolutely will do so if they can make a buck.
  • vocatus_gate 8y ago
    This is why I oppose "cloud services" at all points unless it's absolutely something we can't do ourselves. The second you start relying on another business for a critical service, you've ceded control of your operation. In house is more work, but worth it in the long run. Someone you pay to care about your stuff will never care about it as much as someone who works and maintains it themselves.
• ingenieroariel 8y ago
  If you liked Lefalet I stringly encourage you to try MapboxGl with the Maptiler tiles and your custom styles. Gets rid of the Mapbox logo and is a really smooth experience.
• nkkollaw 8y ago
  That's really a very high price compared to the competition. $7 for 1000 views!?
• spectre256 8y ago
  The upside of this change is it should help raise awareness and investment in mapping products that are open source and use open data. Off the top of my head, there are a number of companies/services that can serve as alternatives to Google Maps, and one way or another they all contribute to the collective quality of open source and open data map tools: * geocode.earth (https://geocode.earth https://geocode.earth) has geocoding including autocomplete based on Pelias(https://github.com/pelias/pelias https://github.com/pelias/pelias) * Interline can help with routing, OSM extracts, and transit data(https://interline.io https://interline.io) * Stadia Maps also offers map tiles and routing (https://stadiamaps.com/ https://stadiamaps.com/) * GraphHopper (https://www.graphhopper.com/ https://www.graphhopper.com/) offers routing and geocoding * OpenCage (https://opencagedata.com/ https://opencagedata.com/) offers geocoding based mainly on Nominatim but also a bunch of other geocoders * Jawg.io (https://www.jawg.io/en/ https://www.jawg.io/en/) offers maps, routing, and geocoding Roughly speaking, open data allows for lower prices because investing directly in gathering proprietary data is super expensive. Open data coverage is getting pretty good in lots of areas, and is better than proprietary data in a lot of developing cities (like Jakarta). It can often be updated much more quickly. Google is notorious for taking a long time to fix errors. Likewise open source map tools are definitely behind Google in many respects, but there's the advantage of transparency and ease of migration if one particular provider happens to go away, or customization is needed. I'm sure I'm missing some services, and am happy to talk more about any of the challenges/features as much as I know. Disclosures: I am a co-founder of geocode.earth, and a former employee of Mapzen, along with the founders of Interline
• jrockway 8y ago
  > Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors. Why would they not increase the price, then? Something I've realized as I've gotten older: sometimes you can't afford the best. That is why there is a market for the cheaper options.
  • cup-of-tea 8y ago
    It's not really the best, though. The article cited to back that up compares Google only to Apple maps and almost entirely focuses on building shapes which add little useful information to the map. Proper street geometry seems more important to begin with.
• rch 8y ago
  I've had acceptable results with GeoServer, OpenLayers, OSM, and PostGIS. I've occasionally done proof of concept work with Leaflet, but that's always turned into Google Maps eventually. MapBox isn't perfect yet but I'm eager to see them deliver on engineering... it's been about a year since I've looked.
• dandigangi 8y ago
  Absolutely insane.... 750k requests to 30k? I know its a business but wow. Just wow.
• socialengineear 8y ago
  Check out TallyGo.com - SDK works like magic for all things mapping, including turn by turn...way easier to implement than mapbox and way better traffic, road network and turn by turn...cheaper too imho
• tomcam 8y ago
  It seems remarkably naive to assume a high quality business that is obviously expensive to run would remain free.
  • nullicorn 8y ago
    The problem isn't that Google Maps is not free, nor is it that they increased its price, but rather __how they went about__ increasing its price.
    • tomcam 8y ago
      Not classy, I definitely agree. But it should be foreseable to anyone with a modicum of business sense
• writepub 8y ago
  This is bad design on the OP's part. I hail from hardware where, for instance, Apple chooses 3 providers for it's SSDs (SanDisk, Samsung, Intel, ...) to shield itself from price gouging, supply issues with any single party, business concerns, etc.. However, I routinely see entire companies based on single providers despite choice existing in the marketplace. The OP should have designed their service around multiple mapping providers from the get go, if a serious business relied on mapping
  • fenwick67 8y ago
    SSDs all have standard interfaces (SATA or whatever), so you can easily swap them out. Conversely, Google Maps doesn't let you implement your own pan/zoom layer on top of their maps API, you have to use their APIs. Yes you could create a compatibility layer for this, but really that seems like a lot of pre-work for something so unforeseen.
    • writepub 8y ago
      Depending on the SKUs of parts used, a single product (say MacBook pro 128GB ) may have multiple SKUs, i.e. versions of the underlying board, to accommodate for different parts and their dependencies. If you're under the assumption that Apple and Co don't spend the effort in abstracting out dependencies on their hardware, your deeply mistaken. A significant portion of engineering in hardware circles is spent in this effort
  • scottydelta 8y ago
    When developing web apps, it is not possible to write the code for the alternative platforms aswell. We are not just talking about changing tiles but also alot of manipulations with the maps in terms of layers, polygons, routes, markers etc on the map. What you are saying is already done in places where it can be, for eg, use of ORMs allow the application to be connected with a variety of DBs and your DB queries and application become independent of the underlying DB.
• Spectral 8y ago
  I work for a startup who's job is to primarily help people find places on a map (free to users, no ads) so this change affected us by a great extent. As I'm working through implementing google's suggested best practices and ways to cut down on API calls, it's still quite a shocking realization that each ONE map load (aka any user that loads our site) costs us almost a cent a piece (0.7 per Dynamic Maps load to be exact) https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-cost-of-use https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-cos...
• JeanMarcS 8y ago
  Some years ago, I worked on a project with a chat between people from different countries and add a Google translate in each sentence. So two people with different languages could exchange a bit. It was almost ready when Google changed the rules and started charging a lot for the service. So I learned my lesson, and never again based a project (or a part of a project) on a tier service, because the rules can change too fast and ruin it all. That what people are experiencing now with Google map.
• eightchen 8y ago
  Starting free then charging once you have all the users isn’t a Google Maps-specific problem.
• IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  This is pretty insane, I think it's about time that tech companies start to honour longer-term contracts and give more notice, even on their hobbyist service offerings. I mean, imagine a local grocery store who's rent would go up by 28x, 1 month notice. Or his procurement costs? That means literal bankruptcy or closing down his shop, virtually overnight. That's just not okay, not after years and years of service. You need to honour contracts for at least a year at a time and give notice. You can give two months notice on a 5% price hike, not a 3000% one. Few other businesses operate in this manner, and those that do we tend to call shady, exploitative, inconsiderate etc.
  • fireattack 8y ago
    > honour longer-term contracts Do they really have such contracts to begin with?
• hatchoo 8y ago
  Wow! I've recently uploaded all my old photos to Google photos to take advantage of the free offering. I guess I should prepare myself for the time they start charging for it.
• dingo_bat 8y ago
  It seems to me that in simplifying the cost structure, Google has excluded some use cases completely. Enterprise pricing should be as complicated as possible, to closely mirror the actual costs incurred by the service provider. Treating every map load the same even though one user can move around the map a lot, zoom out till he can see the earth, etc. is not smart. A much better metric is number of tile loads, so that cost corresponds with usage.
• PerfectElement 8y ago
  Does anyone know of a good alternative to Google Places Autocomplete API? Our app makes 25k requests per day. They had a free 150k limit per day, but now it seems like we are going from $0 to $1,800 per month, and this is not a core feature of our app. I wouldn't mind paying a couple hundred dollars for it, but this price is almost what we pay for our whole infrastructure. The worst part is that we didn't get any notice and I learned about this increase here on HN.
  • spalt 8y ago
    Check out Azure Maps: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ I believe they have an autocomplete component.... I was investigating the Google Traffic API for an app I was working on just as they were making this change. They went from something like 10,000 free requests a day (which would have been plenty for my purposes) to 0 free requests a day. "Don't be evil" my ass. Anyway, the Azure Maps (which uses TomTom data) is much more generous.
  • nuschk 8y ago
    I'm pretty much looking for the same. AFAIK, autocomplete is provided by bing/azure, mapbox, tomtom, HERE and geocode.earth (I might also be missing a few). Also, mapfit (a pretty young participant, it seems) will have it "in a month", they say. Edit: Added geocode.earth.
• jsjohnst 8y ago
  Maybe it’s just me, but I find the MapBox version to look better and have comparable detail to Google (in these examples anyway), and at ~10x cheaper price, seems a no brainer.
• kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Why not host you own OSM data for Poland and Germany? Just reduce the detail level and unneeded layers and deliver vector tiles. This way you are the master of your own destiny and bear (most) of the true cost of your service without any middlemen to charge usurious tolls. Then just make an annual token donation to OSM for their data services and you are done.
  • yetihehe 8y ago
    My company went this route. We host own tiles for whole europe, at high level of detail for several of our projects. Thanks to having all data in our own database we can also do geocoding/geodecoding and we've made our own geodecoder (simple postgres query with some some organically grown rules for interpretation of osm data into address). That resulted in 20x faster service for us than from google and just this geodecoding would cost as much as our server colocation (small 8core/32gb machine with 3 cheap ssd in striping configuration).
  • anticensor 8y ago
    OSM does not have layers, did you mean _eliminating unneeded keys_?
• node-bayarea 8y ago
  Classic monopoly example
• auslander 8y ago
  > we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted It is not free. Your users pay for that with their privacy and Google gets your user's browsing history for free. It is unfair and you should not have used it in the first place.
  • DarkCrusader2 8y ago
    Their "I am not a robot" captcha is in similar vein. If I am training your machine learning models by manually clicking on pictures, I need access to the trained model. I have refused to use dozens of service which required me to click pictures to prove that "I am not a robot" and sent the service provider an email informing them of my decision. I would urge everyone to do the same.
    • danShumway 8y ago
      Not sure where it falls on your ethics continuum, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between a pre-labeled and unlabled picture in a Google Captcha. I've started noticing that if you're sneaky you can get a surprisingly large tolerance for error. I've no idea how effective that actually is at poisoning results. There is an (admittedly a little nasty) part of my brain that really likes the idea that if I'm being asked to provide free labor for a proprietary company, then I'm not really under any obligation to be a great worker. Just refusing to use the service is probably more effective though.
    • auslander 8y ago
      This, plus most sites side load content from major CDN's, like ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery and log the requests. You'll need additional extension besides VPN, Private Browsing and uBlock Origin - Decentraleyes: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes It's amazing how much you need to break free from tracking, but I'm on the war path :) Btw, taking the red pill will cut you off Facebook and Google accounts, unless you provide real phone numbers. Matrix movie: "You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
• pier25 8y ago
  Everyone here is assuming Google is increasing the price to win money. Considering Google Maps is key in Google's business I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually intended to weed out small companies and only keep the big whales around. I don't know the numbers but I imagine Google Maps app/web users are by far the largest traffic source. Traffic from projects using the API must be peanuts in comparison.
• thecodemonkey 8y ago
  I just wanted to add that geocod.io is now a viable alternative to Google Maps for geocoding in terms of both accuracy and pricing. We’re going to continue having a no-credit-card-required 2,500/day free limit, as well as the most affordable pricing, without restrictions. Including a plan that allows for unlimited geocoding. https://geocod.io/pricing https://geocod.io/pricing Full disclaimer: I’m one of the Geocodio founders.
• rurban 8y ago
  There are many similar usecasess described at https://switch2osm.org/case-studies/ https://switch2osm.org/case-studies/ but they all decided to host it by themselves with openstreetmap and leaflet.
• holografix 8y ago
  Could this be a direct reaction to recent EU fines?
  • tomhoward 8y ago
    No. I started getting warnings about this at least 2-3 months ago.
• imhoguy 8y ago
  OpenStreetMap example looks superior but I think it didn't get enough research for this article. Anyone can use Leaflet together with OpenStreetMap for free* for heavy commercial purposes[0] if you make your own mirror/render of OSM tiles. Also simple reverse proxy cache[1] can keep public servers usage acceptable. Styles can be also modified at render stage, e.g. [2]. *The cost is only your one time setup work and then any monthly hosting bill. I encourage anyone to prefer these open alternatives and of course donate money, time or hosting to help develop them. [0] https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/4669/can-i-use-openstreetmap-in-a-commercial-product https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/4669/can-i-use-open... [1] https://pastebin.com/brTQ68nw https://pastebin.com/brTQ68nw [2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/German_Style https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/German_Style
  • jadavies 8y ago
    Agreed, if I needed an alternative to Google Maps then OpenStreetMap would be my first stop even if it meant some work setting up my own server. That way you largely insulate yourself from random price hikes like this. My recent experience in various parts of the UK and one trip to northern Finland is that the OSM is superior to Google maps anyway. And with something like OSMAnd it's trivially easy to use offline.
  • coderesearch 8y ago
    Thanks for your infos, a few questions please: * is the proxy cache an accepted use case also for commercial projects? Where can I find details about that? * what is your recommendation for a geocoder? Also I would like to ask you about your procedure for updating the OSM data and tiles - I found this to be a tedious process. Not at all is this a one-time set-and-forget thing, it is quite a bit of things to understand and maintain.
• truthwhisperer 8y ago
  What i don't fully understand is the rationale behind. Google Maps is a good datasource to be 'included' onto a website so you can track customers, preferences and adapt your ads based on those preferences. So, what we could learn is either: 1) Google has enough data-entry points (based on Javascript hosting, font hosting, (still free) analytics), android etc or 2) Data gathered from ip/device is not worth considering the costs of running/hosting the maps/infra. Result of EU privacy guidelines?! or 3) They think their solution is superior in the market -- All possible answers imply that the next bunch of services which have the same sort of properties will also become paid in my opinion, such as analytics.
• jakeogh 8y ago
  It's almost a law of nature... except groups... come on google. Axe it already. It's awful, everyone knows it. Let it go.
• dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  Seriously, build your own solution based on OpenStreetMap. It's a core project we should all support as we can all benefit from it. Google's model is to build a huge collection of data that is otherwise freely available, and then sell access to it. You can just take OSM data, put them on your own server and embed freely on your website, provided that you credit the project: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_like_to_use_OpenStreetMap_maps._How_should_I_credit_you.3F https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_li...
• roadbeats 8y ago
  I would never trust Google as a business partner based on only my personal experiences. Here is a list of problems I had with Google and its services; - Firebase suddenly changed its pricing, claiming that they were calculating prices incorrectly. A tiny multiplayer game that I made for kids were not fitting the free tier anymore, and my account was locked until I make payment. A sudden e-mail at 6am in the morning was enough to take an app down. Customer service? It doesn’t exist. I lost the data and moved away. The stress didn’t worth it. - Kozmos (getkozmos.com) extension was taken down although it was a simple, open source bookmarking extension (github.com/kozmos) with good description, many HQ screenshots and also a video. I noticed it when users began reporting they couldn’t find the extension. They didn’t even dare to reach me out after taking it down. I sent so many e-mails, users mentioned Google Chrome on Twitter, no response was given. Not even a single response. Again, I had no contact to reach out and ask what is wrong and how we can fix. I was so frustrated that I even wanted to build a new browser and ship my extension with it. - Someone began impersonating me using my full name on blogger. I reported it countless times providing fresh copy of my passport every single time, not even a single response was given. No confirmation, nothing. The blogger is still there impersonating me. My friends also reported it, nothing happened. Here is three experiences. Based on this, I learnt to never trust and rely on any Google service. The last thing is e-mail and search, and I’ll celebrate the day I’m completely free from any Google services.
  • StudentStuff 8y ago
    To dogpile on, among my closest friends we've have over a dozen dead Pixel phones (due to hardware issues, though one started smoking) and a half dozen dead Nexus's. Meanwhile, I'm essentially banned from Google Wallet for sending a friend $600 with a card I'd had on the account for years, with no way of recovering it without giving Google my SSN, multiple utility bills and passport. This is far beyond what Know Your Customer regulations require, and I still was well below KYC thresholds that their competitors use (PayPal, Zelle (no apparent limits)). Considering my bank doesn't have my SSN or passport, I am not handing that out like candy to the world's premier data mining company for a highly questionable account review. This right here is why I'm on Zelle :P
  • dmortin 8y ago
• auslander 8y ago
  Good lesson, I'd say. My experience designing big production systems - is not to rely on any third-party for your mission-critical core operation, even if it's harder, you have control. Google is actually devouring Internet as we speak, like a black hole: - email. Keeping your own server unblocked by Gmail is a loosing battle. I use iCloud, but it still goes through Google for my Gmail and G-Suite peers. - Search - monopoly. Analytics - monopoly. - Android. Try make a phone with open source Android without Google apps and licensing. - Companies and schools move all its people to G Suite (Google). Ten years later 'Internet' will be replaced by 'Google' in dictionaries, as it happened to 'googling'. GSP = Google Service Provider (former ISP), GETF = Google Engineering Task Force (former IETF) :)
• PunchTornado 8y ago
  why would you expect prices for an online service to be different in Poland compared to Germany or Africa? The cost to Google is the same, no matter where the user is. What you're asking is basicaly that people from Germany to subsidise the cost for Poland by paying more, right?
• _hl_ 8y ago
  I maintain a small hobby site that used to have two embedded Google maps. The site is absolutely tiny and would have been well within Google's free tier, and yet I happily moved away from Google Maps when they made the change. Without warning, the two maps suddenly stopped working properly and were covered in grey boxes. Looking for a solution in the documentation, I noticed the new pricing model (the email notice only came after their final deadline) and decided to try generating new API keys. Unfortunately, Google didn't update their API console in time and I was thrown into an endless redirect loop. When I was finally able to obtain my new keys some days later, the two embedded maps refused to load with an unspecific "no longer supported" message. Google's documentation also didn't seem to be updated with any breaking changes. I then decided to move to OpenStreetMap, which also looks much better in my opinion.
• mastef 8y ago
  The weird part is that a Firebase plan for one of my side-projects suddenly auto-updated to the paid "Firebase Blaze". The email notification stated : "Your project was upgraded due to activity in Google Cloud" "A user has set a new billing account for your project in the Google Cloud Platform console. This initiated billing for your project, resulting in an upgrade to your project's Firebase plan." Issue with that is that I never made such a change. So how could "A user" have made this change? The resulting frenzy in inspecting admin and user-logs ( and checking if my account was hacked ) just found a new billing entry called "Google Maps Platform Transition Account" that was suddenly linked to this Firebase project. And I don't even seem to have permissions to inspect it. Very confusing indeed.
  • dmortin 8y ago
    AFAIK people who did not set up billing get this transition account so their access is not cut off completely. https://groups.google.com/forum/?#!topic/firebase-talk/jWRCd9G85VY https://groups.google.com/forum/?#!topic/firebase-talk/jWRCd...
    • mastef 8y ago
      It seems it was an unintended consequence of the Google Maps change and many users were affected and confused by it [1]. If you add a Billing account to a cloud project, Firebase will automatically upgrade you to Blaze. Since Google Maps added a billing account automatically to your Google Cloud account, that auto-upgraded your Firebase plan. The response from the Firebase team [2] was that no additional charges would occur based on this incident, and they've opened an incident report [3] in their dashboard. - [1] StackOverflow Thread with users facing similar confusion https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51373671/project-upgraded-to-the-blaze-plan-due-to-activity-in-the-google-cloud-platform https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51373671/project-upgrade... - [2] Official Firebase response https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-US#!topic/firebase-talk/jWRCd9G85VY https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-US#!topic/firebase-ta... - [3] Firebase incident report for issue "Firebase Users who use Maps API get auto-upgraded to Blaze" https://status.firebase.google.com/incident/Console/18016 https://status.firebase.google.com/incident/Console/18016
  • deleted 8y ago
• brobdingnagians 8y ago
  When I looked into mapping solutions for my company, I realized pretty quickly that MapQuest had a much more transparent and easy to negotiate process than Google maps. It was apparent that Google's API, etc. was more advanced, but we really didn't need that (just retrieving an image of directions in one small sub-section of our site), so I'm glad I went with MapQuest-- which is more than adequate for our purposes and has had price DECREASES instead of increases during our time with them. I think there is something to say for going for an underdog, where they are less likely to mess you over, partly because they can't afford to do that.
• dandare 8y ago
  I used to occasionally contribute to Google Maps with edits, images etc. That will no longer be the case. I understand it will not have almost any impact on Google, but the same is true for instance for elections, yet I make the trip to voting urn almost every year.
• ToBeThrownAway 8y ago
  Throw Away account. The pricing tiers in this article do not include the additional levels of volume discounts which are available if your usage is high. You need to contact a partner or the google sales team to get details of those additional tiers. The small fry like these kind of people are not google's real customers - the real customers were already paying to use the APIs before these changes happened. The free limits before were hugely generous. There is a cost involved in offering the free service. If you weren't paying for it, then google was losing money. If you stop using google for free now because of this, then they actually save money and can now dedicate those resources to supporting actual paying customers for which there are many. Sure individual small users are a drop in the ocean, but multiply that up by many thousands and thousands... Mapping is commoditized. There are many free and paid-for competitors as the article states. If you want the extra value that google offers and chose to stick with using them, then you need to pay for it now. I dont think that is unreasonable. If you dont want to pay for the service and continue getting something valuable for nothing, then go and leech MapBox/Here/someone else's free limits instead. See how long a small company without google's resources can support thousands of startups hammering their services & infrastructure without any revenue to pay for it. Good luck.
• nevi-me 8y ago
  I've incurred $30 since the switch for my website. At about $10 a day, I'd have to pay at least $100 a month (after their $200) discount. By contrast, I pay $170 for my server. I looked at available options, and have been hesitant to switch to another. The article mentions Mapbox's pricing opacity. I tried Mapbox a while ago, to be surprised that map interactions (zooming and loading new tiles) counted as usage. I used up quite a bit in an afternoon of playing around with maps. I'm going to try host tiles myself from next month. I've embarked on a Rustification effort where I'm seeing RAM and CPU savings by porting some services to Rust. Hopefully I'll have spare capacity to host map tiles.
• TheArcane 8y ago
  Azure Maps, Apple Maps, and TomTom all use TomTom map data.
• BruceBlacklaws 8y ago
  Haha - this is actually on my curriculum vitae... "Get Country Data (GCD) A microservice that returns a country's geographical location information. I developed Get Country Data because I wanted to reduce the amount of costly calls my apps were making to the Google Geocoding/Places API and I wanted to know additional information like currency names, currency acronyms, currency symbols (HTML entities), international telephone calling codes. The data came out of multiple other projects I was working on. The data is not read from any external source or a local database but rather it's kept in-memory. The code base contains 42 472 lines of code. Get Country Data is running in Google App Engine on PHP 5.5." Would someone like to assist me in growing this?
• finagle 8y ago
  nepalesenapotheke.de srilankerapotheke.de
• mdekkers 8y ago
  If your product depends on another companies' product, it isn't your product.
• mgkimsal 8y ago
  Has everyone been using google maps on 'internal only' projects? Their TOS has (AFAIK) never allowed free usage for intranet-style systems, only those which would be free and open to the public. Trying to look at pricing for internal use, it was always insane (starting at $10k/year, IIRC). The price change may make it more cost effective for small internal use cases, at the expense of open/free/public use.
• Markoff 8y ago
  from their map comparison seem OSM and Mapbox visually the best and also with the most information, often beating Goggle maps, reason i am using Maps.me in mobile, Gmaps outside US are almost always inferior to other maps
• yellowapple 8y ago
  "If we maintained current monthly usage of both maps and Places (ie. location search), the cost of Google Maps would be multiple times higher than the total cost of all other infrastructure." Well yeah. If Google Maps is the most important component in your infrastructure (seems to be, based on the rest of the article), then it'd be surprising for it to not be the most expensive.
• mjwhansen 8y ago
  What's being missed here is that this is, in some ways, a return to normal for Google Maps. Google only introduced pay-as-you-go Maps API access in September 2015[1]. Before that, you could get 2,500 free per day. If you needed more, you had to sign a $10-20,000/yr enterprise contract. That was it. There was no pay-as-you-go access. If you needed just 5,000 or 15,000 a day, you were SOL. (That's a big reason we launched Geocod.io in the first place, because we found ourselves in that unserved middle of the market.) [1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/google-introduces-uncomplicated-pay-as-you-go-model-for-its-maps-api/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/google-introduces-uncompli...
• radisb 8y ago
  Isn’t it illegal for a business to offer a product/service at a price lower than its cost?
• ashtube 8y ago
  The problem I find is that when these alternative services see how many people are leaving Google Maps and switching to them, those companies will then raise their prices to "remain competitive". Business is business and if they can see an opportunity to make more revenue, they'll do it, whether it be Google or anyone else. It's just a matter of time.
• bawana 8y ago
  Everything google does is to generate data points. Although the rest of the world raises prices to cover costs, increase profits, etc., Google plays with APIs, pricing, availability as a way to generate data to model the behavior of its customers. Simply raising prices to make more money is besides the point. Although the price hike may have been instigated by mundane factors, the way they do it is to understand who is using their product. They could have sneakily inched their way up. Like the frog in the water on the stove, it wont know its cooked until it's too late. Also Google could have (OMG) added ads to map tiles. Or they could have a price scale that changes as you engage more of their services (move your website to GCloud, get more map views for free). By making this most unlikely move ( a move that would alienate customers in most other markets) Google is implementing a limit theorem. It is trying to segregate its customers' behavior into different groups- groups that the customers themselves do not know exist or which they belong in. This kind of data is what they will use to inform their future investment.
  • cheeko1234 8y ago
    On a side note, that frog in the water on the stove metaphor is a myth. >According to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out.[3][4] Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
    • ackchyually 8y ago
      Great detective work.
• Jiri_Komarek 8y ago
  A lot of people is choosing a map because of visual appearance. This is a great advantage of MapTiler, which has a tool where you can with a few mouse clicks totally change the map design, select one of 57 languages or a font for labels[0]. Advanced users can totally change the whole map by switching on/off map elements (schema based on OpenStreetMap tagging)[1] or add own data (MBTiles format - both raster/vector)[2]. There is a support for multiple JavaScript APIs like Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox GL JS (source code snippets in the administration), mobile SDKs (Android as well as iOS) and desktop software development (QT + Unity game engine)[3]. Price calculator is available at [4]. [0] https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/make-own-map-design/ https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/make-own-map-design/ [1] https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/completely-change-the-map-design/ https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/completely-change-the-map-de... [2] https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/hosting-on-maptiler-cloud/ https://www.maptiler.com/how-to/hosting-on-maptiler-cloud/ [3] https://www.maptiler.com/blog/2018/05/openmaptiles-gives-you-freedom-of-sdks.html https://www.maptiler.com/blog/2018/05/openmaptiles-gives-you... [4] https://www.maptiler.com/google-maps-platform-alternative/ https://www.maptiler.com/google-maps-platform-alternative/
• MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  > OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. If I understand correctly, it's not that the database's licence prohibits commercial use, it's just that you're expected to host it yourself, right? How is this a problem?
  • thomasfoster96 8y ago
    Exactly - but self hosting OpenStreetMap is quite a radical step up from embedding Google Maps, hence why you’d get MapBox to do it for you.
• theweb1 8y ago
  Google seems to be revamping its models, nice if you ask me.
• tinus_hn 8y ago
  All these services are surprisingly expensive. I would have expected pricing to be much more reasonable.
• TimTheTinker 8y ago
  A lot of people seem to be aware of MapBox and Apple's MapKit as viable alternatives, but Esri's ArcGIS Online also offers a lot of options for online maps, including allowing users to edit and collaborate on feature data. (disclosure: I'm a developer at Esri)