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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 soft

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
        They were in the free tier, so they were not paying. They even have a nice graph that shows it.
      - FireBeyond 8y ago
        Sounds like a great opportunity for their competitors, then!
    - laGrenouille 8y ago
      The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.
      - emodendroket 8y ago
        Essentially the Google Reader effect, right? Where killing their offering basically killed the entire medium.
        asfasgasg 8y ago
        You've got the causality reversed here. The medium was dying, so the Reader product was killed.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
taurath 8y ago
> 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. This is a bit of “thank you sir may I have another”. 10x price increases? It’s not sustainable? This is just a money grab - they’re not going to give a roadmap for how in the future google maps will be worth 10x the value - it seems to me more of a statement from Google that they have no real competition in the space.
- tomnipotent 8y ago
  Did you to read the article which mentions all the competitors that are available?
  - callalex 8y ago
    The wording was a bit confusing, but I think the GP meant that Google _thinks_ they have no competition so can get away with sudden price gouging.
    - emn13 8y ago
      Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.
      - pliny 8y ago
        This argument is symmetric, it implies all other map providers (who are competitors of google maps and of each other) also have no competitors.
        emn13 8y ago
        Sure, typically yes. It's not necessary - interoperable APIs exist, and for underdogs they're even attractive as a selling point - but market leaders tend not to play by those rules.
da_chicken 8y ago
> 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. It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see how many people jump ship, and when your revenue begins to decline you've gone a bit too far. Of course, they've done it very quickly, so they've likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.
- dmurray 8y ago
  > It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.
  - twistedpair 8y ago
    After all, they've long done away with the tile servers of the past and the giant render farms to make the millions of tiles at 20 different zoom levels to cover the earth. Now it's in browser rendered vector graphics. Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.
    - g-b-r 8y ago
      Maybe they expect a big increase in the cost of imagery acquisition (from what I was able to glean they had a deal for a certain fixed price for a certain period, which might be coming to an end - https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-bella-deal-closes/ https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-...).
  - 8y ago
ryanmercer 8y ago
>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. See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs to stop hemorrhaging money they start charging, often a fairly modest fee, and people lose their damn minds "ermagerd, you're evil, I need this, you can't expect me to pay!". The simple fact that adding a price, or increasing the price, creates such an outrage is indicative, more oft than not, that it is a fair move because the service or good has obvious value to the user. People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up". >When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim. I've been a Project Fi user for 2 and a half years now. This has been my worry every, single, day. Especially since they still owe me like 800$ in statement credits ha.
- chrisan 8y ago
  > People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up". For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing. Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user? I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs. The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing. Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to. If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product. It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business. Does the power company hand out free power? Does the water company hand out free water? Does the phone company let you have free calls? No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia. I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing. In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it. People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out. All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"
chiefalchemist 8y ago
Re: "When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim." Spot on. I would that if a site / application is hitting Maps' paid tier they can (somehow) monitize that traffic and cover the cost. But monitization can't help you if / when they pull the plug. p.s. I sometimes wonder how often Google looks at Slack and regrets mothballing Wave.
amelius 8y ago
This is why Google's generic services should be commoditized as quickly as possible.
- thecrazyone 8y ago
  I agree, but is it _that_ easy? Not like no one has tried
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Which ones aren't?

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
      They were in the free tier, so they were not paying. They even have a nice graph that shows it.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago
      Sounds like a great opportunity for their competitors, then!
  - laGrenouille 8y ago
    The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.
    - emodendroket 8y ago
      Essentially the Google Reader effect, right? Where killing their offering basically killed the entire medium.
      - asfasgasg 8y ago
        You've got the causality reversed here. The medium was dying, so the Reader product was killed.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

taurath 8y ago

> 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. This is a bit of “thank you sir may I have another”. 10x price increases? It’s not sustainable? This is just a money grab - they’re not going to give a roadmap for how in the future google maps will be worth 10x the value - it seems to me more of a statement from Google that they have no real competition in the space.

tomnipotent 8y ago
Did you to read the article which mentions all the competitors that are available?
- callalex 8y ago
  The wording was a bit confusing, but I think the GP meant that Google _thinks_ they have no competition so can get away with sudden price gouging.
  - emn13 8y ago
    Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.
    - pliny 8y ago
      This argument is symmetric, it implies all other map providers (who are competitors of google maps and of each other) also have no competitors.
      - emn13 8y ago
        Sure, typically yes. It's not necessary - interoperable APIs exist, and for underdogs they're even attractive as a selling point - but market leaders tend not to play by those rules.

da_chicken 8y ago

> 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. It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see how many people jump ship, and when your revenue begins to decline you've gone a bit too far. Of course, they've done it very quickly, so they've likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.

dmurray 8y ago
> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.
- twistedpair 8y ago
  After all, they've long done away with the tile servers of the past and the giant render farms to make the millions of tiles at 20 different zoom levels to cover the earth. Now it's in browser rendered vector graphics. Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.
  - g-b-r 8y ago
    Maybe they expect a big increase in the cost of imagery acquisition (from what I was able to glean they had a deal for a certain fixed price for a certain period, which might be coming to an end - https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-bella-deal-closes/ https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-...).
- 8y ago

ryanmercer 8y ago

>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. See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs to stop hemorrhaging money they start charging, often a fairly modest fee, and people lose their damn minds "ermagerd, you're evil, I need this, you can't expect me to pay!". The simple fact that adding a price, or increasing the price, creates such an outrage is indicative, more oft than not, that it is a fair move because the service or good has obvious value to the user. People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up". >When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim. I've been a Project Fi user for 2 and a half years now. This has been my worry every, single, day. Especially since they still owe me like 800$ in statement credits ha.

chrisan 8y ago
> People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up". For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing. Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user? I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs. The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing. Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to. If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product. It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business. Does the power company hand out free power? Does the water company hand out free water? Does the phone company let you have free calls? No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia. I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing. In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it. People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out. All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"

chiefalchemist 8y ago

Re: "When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim." Spot on. I would that if a site / application is hitting Maps' paid tier they can (somehow) monitize that traffic and cover the cost. But monitization can't help you if / when they pull the plug. p.s. I sometimes wonder how often Google looks at Slack and regrets mothballing Wave.

amelius 8y ago

This is why Google's generic services should be commoditized as quickly as possible.

thecrazyone 8y ago
I agree, but is it _that_ easy? Not like no one has tried
lallysingh 8y ago
Which ones aren't?