17 ms·

Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore

787 points by Fej 7y ago

sct202 7y ago
One of the criticisms of when Google Maps API was basically a free for all was that it was suppressing the ability of startups to exist by devaluing products; it seems like with these pricing changes Google is giving the competition an opportunity to swoop in.
- criley2 7y ago
  Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult * Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous * Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps * Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible * Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could
  - lallysingh 7y ago
    The moat's draining because more of this data is becoming commodity. OpenStreetmap data is quite good. I can run a local instance with all the data and the tile server and a web server in a docker image in maybe ~10 min. Source: did this a few years ago during a particularly boring meeting.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      What do you mean when you say "all the data"? The full planet takes "a while", even on a huge computer: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql/benchmarks https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql/benchmarks
      - lallysingh 7y ago
        I recall something like an 8gb download that uncompressed to a postgresql db.
        maxerickson 7y ago
        The thing benchmarked in my other comment loads an OSM dump into PostGIS (in 1 particular format, translating the OSM data from an editing/versioning friendly format to something more useful for map making as it goes). The current full planet dump is 84 GB: https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ 8 GB gets you a large region still, depending on how much mapping has been done: http://download.geofabrik.de/ http://download.geofabrik.de/
  - amundsentb 7y ago
    You wouldn't compete on the things that Google does well, but rather on the things they don't. Not saying it is easy. Price and user interaction is something I believe could be improved upon. Also maybe crowd sourcing info.
    - asdff 7y ago
      Other pain points include bike routing and unreliable (but still more reliable than any other app I've tried) transit times.
  - Reason077 7y ago
    > ”Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult” OpenStreetMap is going from strength to strength. Maps startups no longer need to duplicate Google's on-the-ground mapping efforts. Now, they can make use of open data. Mapbox is perhaps the most well-known, but there are many commercial services based on OSM data: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_and_Services https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_...
    - criley2 7y ago
      When Pokemon Go switched from Gmaps to OSM, the quality drop was dramatic and noticeable. I want OSM to be a real competitor, but I think it represents a perfect example of how difficult it is to compete with Google Maps. It counts as "Good Enough", but man, it's disappointing to see how inferior Pokemon Go maps are these days. Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them, and map data that seems manipulated for game advantage (by players contributing to OSM for gameplay reasons, not for accuracy reason) ... and this is in the midtown area of a top 10 US city.
      - Reason077 7y ago
        > "Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them" This is unfortunate and surprising. In my experience (mostly UK/Europe) the quality of street data in OSM matches, and in some cases exceeds that of Google Maps. (Points-of-interest data does not, however). If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM. > "map data that seems manipulated for game advantage" Perhaps OSM needs some sort of Wikipedia-style spam detection/prevention if this is happening on a wide scale.
        reaperducer 7y ago
        If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM. This is the same argument that keeps every year from being the year of Linux on the desktop. "My computer crashed!" "Oh, just become a Linux kernel developer and fix it yourself."
  - pja 7y ago
    It’s kind of ironic that Google Maps is so bad at some things then. Walking & Cycling directions are especially bad - I get much better directions from OSM than I do from Google Maps. For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the majority of their userbase is.
    - brewdad 7y ago
      GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night. I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to take. The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.
      - viraptor 7y ago
        You mean, there was an edge case where Google didn't have real-life data for a specific accident available for you? This is an extreme case that we wouldn't even expect to exist a few years ago, (and then got annoyed by passive surveillance) but now gmaps is failing for missing it? Is this the new norm? Did you mark the accident yourself when you saw it?
        CamperBob2 7y ago
        He shouldn't need to mark it. Maps can tell that its users are spending 20 minutes to get through a single intersection.
        viraptor 7y ago
        If you have enough users with gmaps on that segment, it will happen. Can we guarantee there was enough in that situation?
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    You're talking about competing as a consumer map/gps, which is not what the blog post is talking about (or the parent comment, I assume). Rather, GMaps used to be the default choice if you wanted to build an app on top of a map (in this case, looking at the effects of nuclear bomb detonations). The blog post explains why GMaps is no longer a reasonable choice, which (as the parent notes) opens up room for competitors.
  - buboard 7y ago
    all of these services sound like things a bunch of different startups would compete to provide. doesn't google outsource stuff?
  - mackrevinack 7y ago
    "mapping the entire planet" that's not true though. I know from doing HOTOSM that there are quite a lot places where there is only a road or two going through it only google maps but there is actually a city/town there. there are some counties where Google Street view cars have never even visited.
- Hendrikto 7y ago
  I think that's not a great argument… If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place. If these companies did not provided added value, what was the justification for their existence in the first place?
  - laumars 7y ago
    Providing an embeddable map solution with developer friendly API used to be a great product. The fact Google disrupted the market with a free solution doesn't mean the product wasn't great up until that point, it just means someone also saw that product idea and undercut them on price. Source: I was using mapping tools before Google Maps came to market.
  - rstupek 7y ago
    Most people will take free and good enough over a superior product any day. Google basically killed the market for mapping products and now have started charging everyone for theirs when used commercially.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    What is your business that can survive arbitrary increases in costs?
  - spookthesunset 7y ago
    That maps api was used by all kinds of hobbyist websites. Once they pulled the plug on free, all those sites bad to scramble to find alternatives.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place. So when a book store giving away books for free puts another book store out of business, that second book store didn't have a great product?
    - chii 7y ago
- zelly 7y ago
  A business model based on data hoarding will never last long-term. As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Like Encarta or Britannica vs. Wikipedia. Lasting value comes from the software in between the database and the view. In the case of encyclopedias or maps, the software is the most trivial part. I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive. You need a massive amount of capital to create a redundant data set that has a death clock, doing nothing good for the world but extracting some small rent created by antitrust laws. No thanks.
  - traderjane 7y ago
    Apple Maps is way more than 60% there in terms of quality but I still don’t find it very compelling for the same reason I won’t switch to DuckDuckGo - a palpable difference in quality gets me paranoid and makes me double check a lot of stuff. That instinct to double check makes me go “Oh well let’s just use Google.”
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      Fortunately, the quality of Google searches has been declining at such a rate that you will soon be double-checking on DDG, instead.
      - andai 7y ago
        Don't they get their results from Google, though?
        Ndymium 7y ago
        No, I think it's Bing and their own index.
        jakear 7y ago
        It’s pretty much just Bing. Saw posted a bit ago that if you DDG “what is my user agent”, the website preview text will show that it’s Bing. Which means DDG is just whitelabling Bing’s index. I use bing exclusively. Sometimes I don’t find what I want, and switching to google is as simple as swapping out the authority. The query syntax is the same.
- blfr 7y ago
  People said the same thing when Google Apps (now G Suite) dropped the free trier. I didn't notice anything happening.
loriverkutya 7y ago
"By which point I had already, in my heart, given up on Google. It’s just not worth it. Let me outline the reasons: They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes. They can’t distinguish between universities as entities, and academics as university researchers. There’s a big difference there, in terms of scale, goals, and resources. I don’t make university IT policy, I do research. They are fickle. It’s not just the fact that they change their pricing schemes rapidly, it’s not just that they deprecate products willy-nilly. It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term. They let cool projects atrophy and die. Sometimes they sell them off to other companies (e.g., SketchUp), who then totally change them and the business model. Again, I get it: Google’s approach is throwing things at the wall, hoping they stick, and believes in disruption more than infrastructure, etc. etc. etc. But that makes it pretty hard to justify putting all of your eggs in their basket. I don’t want to worry about whether Google will think my work is a “social good,” I don’t want to worry about re-applying every year, I don’t want to worry about the branch of Google that helps me out might vanish tomorrow, and so on. Too much uncertainty. Do you know how hard it is to get in contact with a real human being at Google? I’m not saying they’re impossible — they did help me waive some of the fees that came from me not understanding the pricing policy — but that took literally months to work out, and in the meantime they sent a collection agency after me."
- somehnguy 7y ago
  Yes, that is what is written in the article, thanks
sailfast 7y ago
This is a great write-up - thanks to the author and for their continued work in this space to bring home the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Leaflet is an amazing library and I've found it a very useful and powerful tool with a great plugin ecosystem. Glad they managed to land the page someplace that was less dear to them monthly.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
It definitely should not cost 10 cents per visitor to use the maps API to toy around with nuclear scenarios. The idea that he could apply for a “grant” to escape a poor pricing model is insulting and I think good for him for just dumping Google instead. I look forward to seeing how far the 2019 Google backlash goes.
- ravenstine 7y ago
  Too bad the backlash will only be among the modern archmages than hang around HN. The average people whom I know still get a warm fuzzy feeling from The Google. They're largely shielded from the obvious problems the pricing models. As long as the peasants don't have to pay with their pocketbooks, not much will change.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Maybe, but I see a lot of the censorship and demonetization on YouTube getting attention first from conservatives and second from lesser liked candidates like Tulsi, the antitrust investigations in USA and EU, and some of the Facebook and Twitter criticism being rightly shared by Google. I would say “fuck Google” is extending beyond geeks.
- madengr 7y ago
  Jack up the price, give grants, and deduct the grants from your taxes.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  We've already got a co-ordinated YouTube Walkout which, whilst small, is international. It might go further… though I'm looking forward more to people properly beating Google by doing what they do better, and without spying on people to do it.
  - jeen02 7y ago
    Good ol' internet boycotts...
bpodgursky 7y ago
I've found MapBox (if you're using MapBox GL) to have pretty decent pricing on my own hobby projects, albeit higher than I'd prefer I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey. Anyway, I'm glad Nukemap found a way to stay up. I've had fun playing with it, and have used it as a reference before.
- barnabask 7y ago
  Mapbox is awesome, but there are alternatives for hobby projects, such as https://www.maptiler.com/ https://www.maptiler.com/. I wrote about some more here: https://barnabas.me/articles/webmaps.html#map-tile-servers-and-apis https://barnabas.me/articles/webmaps.html#map-tile-servers-a... If your project is confined to a limited geographic area and you don’t need super high zoom levels, you could even host the static tiles yourself without too much trouble and disk space. It can be very cost effective.
- usrusr 7y ago
  Last time I checked, Google was mostly charging per viewer instance, whereas OSM tile providers where universally charging by actual volume. That way, Google pricing would be unbeatably attractive for an SPA where users are panning and zooming a lot in a single map instance, but prohibitively expensive for sites where users open a lot of pages that each contain a little map viewer (or multiple) that is hardly ever interacted with. A clear horses for courses situation. Unfortunately the site I had in mind was just as clearly a "both". The main reason for not self-hosting is data updates I think. Setting up that "data supply chain" might not be very hard or expensive, but it can adds a lot to the overall maintenance demand of a site. Chances are that automation will keep working precisely as long as you can remember how you did it, plus a few more days.
- NetToolKit 7y ago
  > I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey. Mapbox charges ~$4 for a thousand map views, while we charge $0.10 for a thousand map views (less than a tenth of Mapbox's price). How do we convince you to switch to our services? https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about
cowpig 7y ago
Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade, and it drives me crazy. I asked a google employee about this who told me a lot of the changes I hate stem from a refactor around 2014-2015. Obviously there was some big culture shift on the team though... Google maps is * Much, much slower than it used to be. My machine in 2012 was able to drag the map around and everything would load just fine. * Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is. * Much worse at text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and get what I'm looking for. * Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection. It felt pretty dangerous, getting confused by a popup in the map like that mid-intersection), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP. * Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans * While every good review site seems to fail for whatever reason (tough to monetize, and fighting spam/fraud is also hard?), Maps seems to have become the de facto review site in many places. But the UX is so godawful I can't even wrap my head around it. For example, search for a restaurant, and you get one (ONE) possible filter in browsers: star rating. There's also a "more filters" button which brings you to a separate view where star rating is the only available filter. On the phone app, sometimes I can select "open now," and a few other things about 20% of the time I use the app, and it's not clear why those options are gone the rest of the time... I think it's a real shame, because I remember in, e.g. 2012 I thought Google Maps was an incredible revelation. It was so much better than MapQuest, it was free, fast, and just worked. If only they had open-sourced the old version before the refactor... --- Anyway, I hope someone writes a nice open-source view layer that sits on top of OpenStreetMaps someday. Like a wikipedia for maps
- SkyMarshal 7y ago
  >Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is. To add another nitpick, I often want to see the name of the street I’m standing on, especially in San Francisco which doesn’t like spending money on street signs it seems. But GMaps usually requires zooming way out or panning a non-trivial distance to find that. All the other nearby streets on the map have clearly visible names without having to do that, just not the one I’m one. It happens regularly enough to be annoying.
komali2 7y ago
> fobbed me off onto a non-Google “valued partner” who was licensed to deal with corporations on volume pricing. Haha what? Who managed to set that up with Google, and how does it even work? Do they transfer gcloud credits to you? Do you use their gcloud account to make a maps app?
- beering 7y ago
  It's Google's strategy for selling Maps and maybe some other enterprise services. I think it makes sense, actually. The reseller deals with things like basic support, consulting, drafting up contracts, limited negotiations, etc., basically the sort of high-touch stuff we know Google hasn't always been great at. The reseller infra is built into Maps, so you still work with your own Google account, but you pay the reseller. It's not fully in gcloud, afaik, since I remember there being a Salesforce portal you had to use to manage your Maps premium account.
  - wolco 7y ago
    SugarCRM does this. I don't like the setup when support is required because the reseller tries to sell additional products.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Holy shit that's the worst when you're barely holding on trying to get through support tickets, but management wants you to side-sell as well.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  They do the same, have authorized partners who you buy through, for analytics.
sebasmurphy 7y ago
Their documentation seems to be lacking as of late or at least the last time I checked. I was attempting to get geocoding working on a project and was having a hell of time getting the api keys issued with the correct permissions. Swapped over to mapbox and had everything working in a few minutes.
crazygringo 7y ago
> ...people at educational institutions (even not-for-profit ones, like mine) are disqualified from applying. Why? Because Google wants to capture the educational market in a revenue-generating way, and so directs you to their Google for Education site, which as you will quickly find is based on a very different sort of model. ...you have to claim you are representing an entire educational institution (I am not) and that you are interested in implementing Google’s products on your campus (I am not), and if you do all this (as I did, just to get through to them) you can finally talk to them a bit. The base Google for Education used by most educational institutions has always been free, it's not revenue-generating. And even if the author had gone the non-profit route, Google for Nonprofits is the same -- you have to represent your entire nonprofit institution. Because when you're part of a large institution, your institution is responsible for licensing, grants, policies, etc. Google (justifiably) doesn't want to deal with 100 different professors setting up 100 different free quotas and not talking to each other. They want it to all be tracked at an institution level.
- yborg 7y ago
  Professors are accustomed to requesting grants from individual entities all the time and while they may often have internal institutional review or coordination, the granting entities don't typically require all requests from say Harvard to be submitted by Harvard as an institution. tl;dr professors are used to submitting proposals for grants directly to an organization, Google's approach at least in higher education would not be what a professor would consider the norm.
underbluewaters 7y ago
As a software developer for a lab within a big University, I appreciate the bit about Google offering edu discounts, but only if working with a representative _for the entire institution_. A lot of big companies offer discounts this way and it is maddening. There are so many different development projects within a university setting and they often operate with zero involvement of campus IT. It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  > It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license. I love this analogy. Also please let me pick a nit: It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a federation!
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    Bizarrely, there's no good word for "pertaining to a country". The likely preferred option "national" is subject to a similar objection ("It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a nation!"--not all countries are nation-states, and we have more than one salient example in the anglosphere!), and "state" has the unfortunate property of meaning something very different to an American.
    - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
      >there's no good word for "pertaining to a country" In English, the question then becomes "Where are we going to import this word from?"
    - skrebbel 7y ago
      "National" is a weird word in English, because it doesn't typically mean "pertaining to the entire nation" but more like "pertaining to the entire country". I think it's usually the proper term. It translates to "country-al" in the other languages I know. That said, I don't know about the UK. If a Londoner talks about the "national level", is that England or the UK? Oh damn I'm wrong and starting to see your point. Eg in German, "land" refers specifically to the federal state and not the federation. You need to use bundessomethingsomething to address all of Germany. Weird stuff! EDIT suddenly I realize how weird a name the UN has. There's not really any proper nation states left in the word. Bhutan maybe? I have no idea, but I like to think that it would've been the United Countries but then Scotland would've wanted a seat.
buboard 7y ago
google's business is ads, monopoly ads, and all these side projects were good for distracting people from their monopoly. they don't care because they don't need to care and i wouldnt be surprised if all their services incl. gmail have the same fate. good thing that the market abhors a vacuum
- xvector 7y ago
  > good thing that the market abhors a vacuum Indeed. I greatly prefer Apple Maps on iOS. The directions barely take any longer and the UX is just so much better.
  - ViViDboarder 7y ago
    The new voice prompts on Apple Maps are great. “Turn right at the next stop sign” is way more helpful than “In 1000 feet, turn right”
    - wolco 7y ago
      If they combined them turn right next stop sign about a thousand feet. Otherwise it's like this stop sign here or do they mean that one..
      - dbt00 7y ago
        They say things like turn left at the second light.
seshagiric 7y ago
Since the Google Maps price hike, there are a number of such projects that have got affected. However I am curious why no one seems to be considering Bing Maps (from Microsoft) at all?? Bing Maps actually has a pretty decent free usage quota that should fit most such projects (either free or low cost).
- nxc18 7y ago
  Not even Azure uses Bing Maps. Instead of using their own existing mapping platform, Microsoft created Azure Maps, complete with a totally independent data store, rendering, etc. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I miss the Bing maps that was innovating and delivering regularly, but I haven't taken them seriously since 2016 at least; this is coming from a former Bing fanboy. edit - links: * Azure Maps: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ * Bing Maps: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-api https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-a...
  - throwawayGMaps 7y ago
    From their copyrights, it looks like - Azure uses TomTom - Bing uses HERE (formerly Navteq/Nokia) Did Microsoft buy all of Nokia? Or just their phone business?
    - nxc18 7y ago
      Microsoft only bought parts. HERE has been its own thing for a while now. https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/here-and-microsoft-extend-mapping-deal-expanding-into-connected-car-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/here-and-microsoft-extend-... Related - Uber hired/bought many of the engineers and assets involved in Bing Maps' data: https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-bings-mapping-assets-will-absorb-around-100-microsoft-employees/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-bing...
mrtri 7y ago
because nukes dont exists, research it, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compare it with photos of Tokyo, almost the same damage, flat with some trees and buildings standing.. no crater, no radiation, how can trees and building survive at groundzero? undamaged buildings, and bridges at groundzero but miles away from center concrete buildings collapsed , blown away . no radiation problem, they started walking around and started rebuilding the cities just days after. search hiroshima Tram that restarted service just 3 days after the bombing. nuclear tests are fake with huge pile of normal explosives, and some hollywood editing. all fake. you can see clouds not moving because they use layers, and colors dont match.
tssva 7y ago
The average after financial aid per student cost to attend Stevens Institute of Technology is $35k. As of 2017 they had an endowment of $184 million dollars. If they thought this was enough of a priority they could allocate the additional funding for this. The fact that they haven't and that the lower $200 a month was coming out of pocket versus being paid by Stevens indicates the level of importance they place on this work. Why should Google in essence help fund work that the organization doing the work can afford to but doesn't want to fund?
- detaro 7y ago
  > I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with an institution (my employers, the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology) that was willing to foot the bill.
spaethnl 7y ago
I develop an application at a university that allows users to share and lookup accessibility information on public places that uses Google Maps and the Google Places API. We have run in to exactly the same issues as described in this post and we have had a few meetings on what to do about it. I would like to switch to OSM but I haven't been able to find a quality replacement for the Google Places API, which is critical to our application. We could switch to using OSM + Places, to at least partially alleviate our problem, except that Google requires any Google Places API results that are displayed on a map to be displayed on a Google Map, which really locks us in. Is anyone aware of a good Google Places API alternative, including any paid self-hosted databases?
- nathancahill 7y ago
  What type of accessibility information are you getting back from the Places API? OSM seems like a great fit for this since information is tagged in a structured way: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities Feel free to email me, this is my area of expertise. For projects like that I can often help pro-bono.
  - spaethnl 7y ago
    We actually aren't using the accessibility data from the Places API, we are collecting and displaying custom data that is provided by users (detailed ratings, reviews and pictures from regular users, and highly detailed building assessments from trained users). We only need the places API for having a comprehensive list of nearby places. Other services had too few places in general, but didn't necessarily lack information about the places that were available.
  - spaethnl 7y ago
    I just spent some more time looking at OSM's place data, and I'm not sure if more has been added since last looking at it, or if I wasn't using it correctly, but it seems to have more than I remember. I see that a couple of popular restaurants that have been around for at least a decade are still not shown, but maybe that is anomalous? I'll have to re-consider OSM.
WD-42 7y ago
In this post the author speaks a lot to how inaccessible Google is for any kind of support. This is one of the under appreciate reasons NOT to use services provided by the big cloud providers: AWS, GCP, etc. I recently started a small SASS project for a client and decided that Heroku would be a good fit for the situation. That led me to use smaller independent service providers like Mailgun for email, Mapbox for maps, Transloadit for video encoding. I haven't needed much support but when I have I actually talk to real people (and developers on the other end). It's a very pleasant experience. I get much more of a feeling that they actually care about developers using their products. Plus it feels "good" to be supporting independent shops, instead of giant tech monoliths. Consolidated billing can be annoying if you decide to go with many smaller, independent providers. At least Heroku covers that well.
- MiroF 7y ago
  It's crazy the extent to which for big companies this experience is different. The large tech company that I work for has AWS developers& support lingering in dedicated Slack channels on our company Slack where they will help talk you through any issues and keep you updated on feature requests/bugs moving through the Amazon system.
  - celim307 7y ago
    yeah but Enterprise level support with TAM's cost upwards of 15k a month. That's pretty prohibitive for most small startups
    - specialp 7y ago
      You can pay $100/10% a month on Amazon and get good support. They will debug and guide you on. Hiring someone with the expertise you get would cost magnitudes of order more. And if your enterprise is at the level where it warrants 15k a month support, it is still worth it. Considering that still would barely get you only one skilled person hired.
      - 7y ago
ilaksh 7y ago
Google wanting to get paid for use of its APIs doesn't seem like the most significant aspect of this post to me. I hope some of us are able to escape from this planet before it is destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. This is why I think that the lunar and mars missions should be a bigger priority.
- incompatible 7y ago
  I suspect that even after a nuclear war, Earth will still be far more inhabitable than either the Moon or Mars.
upofadown 7y ago
>But in 2018, Google changes its pricing model, and my bill jumped to more like $1,800 per month. Presumably, Google has done the market research here and had found that this level of pricing will end up maximizing revenue. It would be interesting to have a generally accepted model for these no money now, money later business models based on some measure of industry lock in. That way it would be possible to do the pricing at the start of a project rather than part of the way through when everyone had forgotten to budget anything. The Googles of the world get to know how much our projects are going to cost, why can't we at least get an idea?
- TheRealPomax 7y ago
  That presumes a project starts with people who intend to charge from the get-go, but defer that step to later. Rather than being started by folks who love what they're doing, getting funneled into a PM'ed project where the enthusiasm is curbed by "product viability", and then goes through a period of a few years where the original project folks rotate out until no one left is invested in how useful the product is, and a lot of folks are invested in how much money can be made by pivoting to a model that heavily monetizes on scoping down to purely the most used features used by its biggest, financially secure customers.
  - takeda 7y ago
    That reminded me of a project where person leading it estimated that it will be cheaper and faster to use AWS, they only forgot all the hidden fees that AWS adds, most commonly the network fees (which are charged between AZs) or EBS etc. On top of that an instance that claims to have specific parameters won't deliver the same performance as supposedly equivalent physical machine, so you will need to use bigger instances etc. Ultimately the project did not have resources to set up DR version which was originally planned and still went way over the budget.
SeanFerree 7y ago
Very interesting!
kuroguro 7y ago
If you're not afraid of breaching Google's ToS you can load Google tiles directly with leaflet. The tiles themselves have no API key requirement. Obviously not a proper solution both legally and technically as the routes are undocumented and can change at any time (tho I've seen only 1 major change in the past ~7 years).
Diesel555 7y ago
I switched from Google Maps to Apple's Mapkit JS. It's awesome. And they respond to bug reports and make quick fixes. https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/ https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Like, Feedback Assistant reports?
lemoncucumber 7y ago
> [B]ut they do have a way to request discounted access to the Google Cloud Platform, which appears to be some kind of machine-learning platform This line in the article made me laugh out loud. GCP is a full blown competitor to AWS, but it sounds like whatever marketing page the author landed on is hyping machine learning so much that they didn't even realize that.
FpUser 7y ago
For business, dedicated servers are the only thing I am paying for (also mirrored on me on premises). Well there is still some storage fees from Mediafire but I am in a process of moving it to dedicates servers as well. Following few very unpleasant experiences with the cloudy stuff I've develop a simple rule. NOTHING gets done/developed for my businesses until I can run it on premises and rented dedicated servers.
tpmx 7y ago
The general underlying reason: Google has shifted from the innovation/growth phase run by engineers to the MBA/marketing/lawyer-managed monetization phase.
- ysopex 7y ago
  Thank you, I was about to comment it's not a service it's a product. And frankly this has always been the case they were just more subtle about it in the past.
Symmetry 7y ago
I'm excited to hear about the new fallout feature in Nukemap.
fastball 7y ago
I feel that the author is seriously underestimating the cost of his traffic to the Google Maps API.
Qub3d 7y ago
>It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term. They let cool projects atrophy and die. This is the absolute root of the problem, and one that is unique to Google among the big cloud providers. Yes, AWS may roll out new features, but generally the core stuff stays put. I'm not losing sleep over route 53 getting "sunset" with a 1 month notice. Can't say the same about Google. While it won't sink them, I can see this becoming a bigger and bigger obstacle as the number of IT pros who get caught in the fallout of Google's internal ADHD grows. If Google, or a vendor using a product on top of Google services contacts me, I'm not touching it unless they're willing to enter into an SLA where they pay for the trouble of migrating my stuff when they axe the service. In other words, I'm not using it, because no one would ever offer such a thing.
- mesoman 7y ago
  It's internal Aspergers, not just ADHD. Google seems to have no insight into its users.
nik736 7y ago
We switched to Mapbox as well, the only downside we faced was the horrendous satelitte maps. They apperantly bought a lot of satellite imagery, but it still looks way way worse compared to Google or Apple Maps. The weird thing is that when zooming in it gets pixelated, even though the maps actually look more crisp when not zoomed in completely.
- jeen02 7y ago
  The streets are pretty offset as well :(
chihuahua 7y ago
There is something called "Here maps" that's a pretty good alternative to Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps for mobile phones. Obviously that's not what Nukemap is talking about, but for those who are frustrated with the shortcomings of those 3 apps, "Here WeGo" is a free Android/iOS app. It was developed by Nokia and then sold off. I like it because I can download an entire state with just a few clicks. And the UI isn't cluttered by "explore your neighborhood" nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_WeGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_WeGo
- henriks 7y ago
  Here wasn’t really developed by Nokia; it existed as Navteq before Nokia bought it in the 00’s and was headquartered in Chicago. At some point at least they were a fairly big player in in-car navigation systems.
rotrux 7y ago
Google maps is only profitable on the basis of advertising syndication & data collection. If you're not pumping google information about how people are using your map service or directing people to the sites of google's ads customers, they are probably losing money by serving you. The issue is similar to the one that ruined their custom search offering: it doesn't make them enough money to justify its existence as anything more than a public service. Unless charity is what Google had in mind when they launched the api, their behavior makes business sense.
perspective1 7y ago
Kind of predictable. Google's a business. Surprise, surprise, you can't rely on its free services long-term.
pbw 7y ago
Google has 100,000 employees not one can offer up anything in defense of their pricing? That's sad, I'm sure they have some explanation for what they did, and why they did it, and how they want things to evolve from here. Would be nice to hear something even if it was PR laden. This pricing hike is over a year and old and everywhere I see complaints and about it and not a shred of explanation from them. I'd expect something like "Yes Google Maps was free for a long time, but it's a very expensive service to run, for the service to exist long term we needed to increase the cost. Here are some resources how to contain your costs. Here is how to apply to be a non-profit." I have to believe there are hundreds of people at Google who fully understand this has ruined many people's projects, do they not feel some obligation to at least open up a channel of communication? Seems like a no-brainer. Or are they just so embarrassed and so wracked with in-fighting that they can't stomach even authoring a post?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nojvek 7y ago
  I'm sure Google employees are probably not allowed to comment on HN without legal approval. BigCos have a lot of red-tape for communication.
jaquers 7y ago
Lots of comments (bitching) here about not showing street names. Can confirm, there are definitely bugs regarding street names being off-screen / not showing at the right zoom levels. But are we technologists, or what? Figure out the behavior and suggest a solution. I find that it happens to throw street names close to major intersections, which happen to be offscreen due to panning. Seems to me that there could be a change to detect when a street name is not present on the screen and make an adjustment to do the same. In other words tweak the heuristic for showing names +- zoom level. They do have _a lot_ of data. I think it's really popular to hate on Google right now for a myriad of reasons—but I also think that people who work on Gmaps want to improve their product. Y'all know how to file bug reports. Expected behavior, current behavior, steps to reproduce, etc. Stop complaining about a service that is free, or else—don't use it. BTW; agree w/ the majority of OP's points regarding contacting humans & lack of features / price etc for API. That's valid feedback.
jaimex2 7y ago
Google's pricing change is a really good thing. Diversity is needed on the Internet and since their changes things like MapBox and OSM have had a big increase in uptake.
shreyamathur651 7y ago
Use Google Maps In Google Chrome Browser! You will defined able to find the Nukemap
Uptrenda 7y ago
1. Give product away at a loss / or even for free. 2. People say 'great', and start taking advantage of it. 3. Competitors (for profit) can't keep up and slowly stop offering products. 4. Over time the majority of the market is capture by a single company. 5. People become overly dependent on that company, allowing them to build an even bigger, better 'moat', and discouraging any new competitors from emerging. 6. $$$$$$$$$ Prices get jacked up. Customers have no alternatives. Kind of like an army besieging a walled city. A company doesn't need to build the best product or have the best fighters to win. They just need enough resources to outlast the competition and they automatically get access to the left-overs.
- stoolpigeon 7y ago
  In the linked post he states that the changes mystify him because there are alternatives. So if Google is following the plan you've laid out, they are not doing it well.
forrestthewoods 7y ago
I wrote a commute visualizer. Imho it’s better than anything else widely available - free or paid. Given a home/office it can visualize commute times for multiple modes of transit. Google’s new pricing scheme makes it cost multiple dollars for a single map. Their new pricing scheme is beyond absurd and has no basis in reality.
alexellisuk 7y ago
What are the main limitations of OpenStreetMaps here? I used Google Maps back when the pricing was at that lower point, and am working with Mapbox now for a project.
heisenbit 7y ago
Taking the power e.g. search, the profits from one domain e.g. advertisement and going into another domain e.g. 2-D maps and charging nothing or little until competition has thinned and dominant position has been achieved and then raising prizes tenfold is the sort of behavior regulators find interesting.
- nojvek 7y ago
  Unfortunately US regulators are too sissy (or probably already in bed with the big corps) unlike the old days where Microsoft was getting sued left and right due to antitrust violations.
daveheq 7y ago
I dont know why the author can't download a cached map every month and use that for the hits.
nojvek 7y ago
> They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes. That is really true. Google isn't for the small devs anymore, they're too big to care about us. They need to cross that trillion dollar mark and it seems everything's about profits right now. Lesson: Don't even touch google apis unless you're a really large corporation willing to spend >10k per month. Even if you're a really large corporation, have a plan B, because google will still fuck you over with their APIs changing without much notice.
aagha 7y ago
It's frustrating that with the number of Google engineers out there--many of which reach HN--to not see any comments from them about a post like this. It's almost as if they don't care, or are now worried that saying something could negatively impact them.

787 points by Fej 7y ago

One of the criticisms of when Google Maps API was basically a free for all was that it was suppressing the ability of startups to exist by devaluing products; it seems like with these pricing changes Google is giving the competition an opportunity to swoop in.

criley2 7y ago
Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult * Massive staff and fleet of vehicles on the ground with multiple sensors mapping the entire planet. Capital costs here are enormous * Massive network and bandwidth with caches in just about every major IX to deliver ultra high performance maps * Major established contracts with satellite mapping vendors to get the best data as early as possible * Major brand recognition with many users using the app and knowing it to be the best of the best I would never want to compete here, but a major institutional player could
- lallysingh 7y ago
  The moat's draining because more of this data is becoming commodity. OpenStreetmap data is quite good. I can run a local instance with all the data and the tile server and a web server in a docker image in maybe ~10 min. Source: did this a few years ago during a particularly boring meeting.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    What do you mean when you say "all the data"? The full planet takes "a while", even on a huge computer: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql/benchmarks https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osm2pgsql/benchmarks
    - lallysingh 7y ago
      I recall something like an 8gb download that uncompressed to a postgresql db.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        The thing benchmarked in my other comment loads an OSM dump into PostGIS (in 1 particular format, translating the OSM data from an editing/versioning friendly format to something more useful for map making as it goes). The current full planet dump is 84 GB: https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ https://planet.openstreetmap.org/ 8 GB gets you a large region still, depending on how much mapping has been done: http://download.geofabrik.de/ http://download.geofabrik.de/
- amundsentb 7y ago
  You wouldn't compete on the things that Google does well, but rather on the things they don't. Not saying it is easy. Price and user interaction is something I believe could be improved upon. Also maybe crowd sourcing info.
  - asdff 7y ago
    Other pain points include bike routing and unreliable (but still more reliable than any other app I've tried) transit times.
- Reason077 7y ago
  > ”Google Maps has a multi-layered business moat that makes competition really difficult” OpenStreetMap is going from strength to strength. Maps startups no longer need to duplicate Google's on-the-ground mapping efforts. Now, they can make use of open data. Mapbox is perhaps the most well-known, but there are many commercial services based on OSM data: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_and_Services https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Commercial_OSM_Software_...
  - criley2 7y ago
    When Pokemon Go switched from Gmaps to OSM, the quality drop was dramatic and noticeable. I want OSM to be a real competitor, but I think it represents a perfect example of how difficult it is to compete with Google Maps. It counts as "Good Enough", but man, it's disappointing to see how inferior Pokemon Go maps are these days. Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them, and map data that seems manipulated for game advantage (by players contributing to OSM for gameplay reasons, not for accuracy reason) ... and this is in the midtown area of a top 10 US city.
    - Reason077 7y ago
      > "Roads that don't exist, buildings in random places with roads going through them" This is unfortunate and surprising. In my experience (mostly UK/Europe) the quality of street data in OSM matches, and in some cases exceeds that of Google Maps. (Points-of-interest data does not, however). If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM. > "map data that seems manipulated for game advantage" Perhaps OSM needs some sort of Wikipedia-style spam detection/prevention if this is happening on a wide scale.
      - reaperducer 7y ago
        If you do notice errors and omissions, fixes can be made in seconds by getting an OSM account and clicking the "edit" button on OpenStreetMap.org. In recent years the development of the "ID" editor has significantly lowered the barriers to entry of editing OSM. This is the same argument that keeps every year from being the year of Linux on the desktop. "My computer crashed!" "Oh, just become a Linux kernel developer and fix it yourself."
- pja 7y ago
  It’s kind of ironic that Google Maps is so bad at some things then. Walking & Cycling directions are especially bad - I get much better directions from OSM than I do from Google Maps. For driving directions GMaps is much better. I presume that’s where the majority of their userbase is.
  - brewdad 7y ago
    GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night. I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to take. The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      You mean, there was an edge case where Google didn't have real-life data for a specific accident available for you? This is an extreme case that we wouldn't even expect to exist a few years ago, (and then got annoyed by passive surveillance) but now gmaps is failing for missing it? Is this the new norm? Did you mark the accident yourself when you saw it?
      - CamperBob2 7y ago
        He shouldn't need to mark it. Maps can tell that its users are spending 20 minutes to get through a single intersection.
        viraptor 7y ago
        If you have enough users with gmaps on that segment, it will happen. Can we guarantee there was enough in that situation?
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  You're talking about competing as a consumer map/gps, which is not what the blog post is talking about (or the parent comment, I assume). Rather, GMaps used to be the default choice if you wanted to build an app on top of a map (in this case, looking at the effects of nuclear bomb detonations). The blog post explains why GMaps is no longer a reasonable choice, which (as the parent notes) opens up room for competitors.
- buboard 7y ago
  all of these services sound like things a bunch of different startups would compete to provide. doesn't google outsource stuff?
- mackrevinack 7y ago
  "mapping the entire planet" that's not true though. I know from doing HOTOSM that there are quite a lot places where there is only a road or two going through it only google maps but there is actually a city/town there. there are some counties where Google Street view cars have never even visited.
Hendrikto 7y ago
I think that's not a great argument… If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place. If these companies did not provided added value, what was the justification for their existence in the first place?
- laumars 7y ago
  Providing an embeddable map solution with developer friendly API used to be a great product. The fact Google disrupted the market with a free solution doesn't mean the product wasn't great up until that point, it just means someone also saw that product idea and undercut them on price. Source: I was using mapping tools before Google Maps came to market.
- rstupek 7y ago
  Most people will take free and good enough over a superior product any day. Google basically killed the market for mapping products and now have started charging everyone for theirs when used commercially.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  What is your business that can survive arbitrary increases in costs?
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  That maps api was used by all kinds of hobbyist websites. Once they pulled the plug on free, all those sites bad to scramble to find alternatives.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  If the free Google Maps API put your company out of business, it didn't have a great product in the first place. So when a book store giving away books for free puts another book store out of business, that second book store didn't have a great product?
  - chii 7y ago
zelly 7y ago
A business model based on data hoarding will never last long-term. As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Like Encarta or Britannica vs. Wikipedia. Lasting value comes from the software in between the database and the view. In the case of encyclopedias or maps, the software is the most trivial part. I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive. You need a massive amount of capital to create a redundant data set that has a death clock, doing nothing good for the world but extracting some small rent created by antitrust laws. No thanks.
- traderjane 7y ago
  Apple Maps is way more than 60% there in terms of quality but I still don’t find it very compelling for the same reason I won’t switch to DuckDuckGo - a palpable difference in quality gets me paranoid and makes me double check a lot of stuff. That instinct to double check makes me go “Oh well let’s just use Google.”
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Fortunately, the quality of Google searches has been declining at such a rate that you will soon be double-checking on DDG, instead.
    - andai 7y ago
      Don't they get their results from Google, though?
      - Ndymium 7y ago
        No, I think it's Bing and their own index.
        jakear 7y ago
        It’s pretty much just Bing. Saw posted a bit ago that if you DDG “what is my user agent”, the website preview text will show that it’s Bing. Which means DDG is just whitelabling Bing’s index. I use bing exclusively. Sometimes I don’t find what I want, and switching to google is as simple as swapping out the authority. The query syntax is the same.
blfr 7y ago
People said the same thing when Google Apps (now G Suite) dropped the free trier. I didn't notice anything happening.

loriverkutya 7y ago

"By which point I had already, in my heart, given up on Google. It’s just not worth it. Let me outline the reasons: They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes. They can’t distinguish between universities as entities, and academics as university researchers. There’s a big difference there, in terms of scale, goals, and resources. I don’t make university IT policy, I do research. They are fickle. It’s not just the fact that they change their pricing schemes rapidly, it’s not just that they deprecate products willy-nilly. It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term. They let cool projects atrophy and die. Sometimes they sell them off to other companies (e.g., SketchUp), who then totally change them and the business model. Again, I get it: Google’s approach is throwing things at the wall, hoping they stick, and believes in disruption more than infrastructure, etc. etc. etc. But that makes it pretty hard to justify putting all of your eggs in their basket. I don’t want to worry about whether Google will think my work is a “social good,” I don’t want to worry about re-applying every year, I don’t want to worry about the branch of Google that helps me out might vanish tomorrow, and so on. Too much uncertainty. Do you know how hard it is to get in contact with a real human being at Google? I’m not saying they’re impossible — they did help me waive some of the fees that came from me not understanding the pricing policy — but that took literally months to work out, and in the meantime they sent a collection agency after me."

somehnguy 7y ago
Yes, that is what is written in the article, thanks

sailfast 7y ago

This is a great write-up - thanks to the author and for their continued work in this space to bring home the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. Leaflet is an amazing library and I've found it a very useful and powerful tool with a great plugin ecosystem. Glad they managed to land the page someplace that was less dear to them monthly.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago

It definitely should not cost 10 cents per visitor to use the maps API to toy around with nuclear scenarios. The idea that he could apply for a “grant” to escape a poor pricing model is insulting and I think good for him for just dumping Google instead. I look forward to seeing how far the 2019 Google backlash goes.

ravenstine 7y ago
Too bad the backlash will only be among the modern archmages than hang around HN. The average people whom I know still get a warm fuzzy feeling from The Google. They're largely shielded from the obvious problems the pricing models. As long as the peasants don't have to pay with their pocketbooks, not much will change.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Maybe, but I see a lot of the censorship and demonetization on YouTube getting attention first from conservatives and second from lesser liked candidates like Tulsi, the antitrust investigations in USA and EU, and some of the Facebook and Twitter criticism being rightly shared by Google. I would say “fuck Google” is extending beyond geeks.
madengr 7y ago
Jack up the price, give grants, and deduct the grants from your taxes.
wizzwizz4 7y ago
We've already got a co-ordinated YouTube Walkout which, whilst small, is international. It might go further… though I'm looking forward more to people properly beating Google by doing what they do better, and without spying on people to do it.
- jeen02 7y ago
  Good ol' internet boycotts...

bpodgursky 7y ago

I've found MapBox (if you're using MapBox GL) to have pretty decent pricing on my own hobby projects, albeit higher than I'd prefer I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey. Anyway, I'm glad Nukemap found a way to stay up. I've had fun playing with it, and have used it as a reference before.

barnabask 7y ago
Mapbox is awesome, but there are alternatives for hobby projects, such as https://www.maptiler.com/ https://www.maptiler.com/. I wrote about some more here: https://barnabas.me/articles/webmaps.html#map-tile-servers-and-apis https://barnabas.me/articles/webmaps.html#map-tile-servers-a... If your project is confined to a limited geographic area and you don’t need super high zoom levels, you could even host the static tiles yourself without too much trouble and disk space. It can be very cost effective.
usrusr 7y ago
Last time I checked, Google was mostly charging per viewer instance, whereas OSM tile providers where universally charging by actual volume. That way, Google pricing would be unbeatably attractive for an SPA where users are panning and zooming a lot in a single map instance, but prohibitively expensive for sites where users open a lot of pages that each contain a little map viewer (or multiple) that is hardly ever interacted with. A clear horses for courses situation. Unfortunately the site I had in mind was just as clearly a "both". The main reason for not self-hosting is data updates I think. Setting up that "data supply chain" might not be very hard or expensive, but it can adds a lot to the overall maintenance demand of a site. Chances are that automation will keep working precisely as long as you can remember how you did it, plus a few more days.
NetToolKit 7y ago
> I have to assume the fact that nobody is just cheap-hosting opentiles mapsets for a tenth of the price indicates that the underlying infrastructure (bandwidth?) is pretty pricey. Mapbox charges ~$4 for a thousand map views, while we charge $0.10 for a thousand map views (less than a tenth of Mapbox's price). How do we convince you to switch to our services? https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about https://www.nettoolkit.com/geo/about

cowpig 7y ago

Maps has gotten progressively worse in most ways over the past decade, and it drives me crazy. I asked a google employee about this who told me a lot of the changes I hate stem from a refactor around 2014-2015. Obviously there was some big culture shift on the team though... Google maps is * Much, much slower than it used to be. My machine in 2012 was able to drag the map around and everything would load just fine. * Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is. * Much worse at text parsing e.g. I can no longer loosely type something like "10th and grove to Jim's Hardware" and get directions. In fact most of the time I can't even type in a major intersection and get what I'm looking for. * Obnoxiously spammy: they push new "features" on me all the time that I don't want to use (including a recent popup mid-directions when I turned on location tracking because I was lost on a busy, complicated highway intersection. It felt pretty dangerous, getting confused by a popup in the map like that mid-intersection), and the phone version asks me to turn on location tracking EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE APP. * Addresses seem to be getting replaced by some weird google maps-designed address format in Colombia (maybe other countries?) that are useless to humans * While every good review site seems to fail for whatever reason (tough to monetize, and fighting spam/fraud is also hard?), Maps seems to have become the de facto review site in many places. But the UX is so godawful I can't even wrap my head around it. For example, search for a restaurant, and you get one (ONE) possible filter in browsers: star rating. There's also a "more filters" button which brings you to a separate view where star rating is the only available filter. On the phone app, sometimes I can select "open now," and a few other things about 20% of the time I use the app, and it's not clear why those options are gone the rest of the time... I think it's a real shame, because I remember in, e.g. 2012 I thought Google Maps was an incredible revelation. It was so much better than MapQuest, it was free, fast, and just worked. If only they had open-sourced the old version before the refactor... --- Anyway, I hope someone writes a nice open-source view layer that sits on top of OpenStreetMaps someday. Like a wikipedia for maps

SkyMarshal 7y ago
>Harder to read/understand, especially street names. A lot of the time I have to zoom in 100% and scroll up and down a street to see what the name of the street I'm looking at is. To add another nitpick, I often want to see the name of the street I’m standing on, especially in San Francisco which doesn’t like spending money on street signs it seems. But GMaps usually requires zooming way out or panning a non-trivial distance to find that. All the other nearby streets on the map have clearly visible names without having to do that, just not the one I’m one. It happens regularly enough to be annoying.

komali2 7y ago

> fobbed me off onto a non-Google “valued partner” who was licensed to deal with corporations on volume pricing. Haha what? Who managed to set that up with Google, and how does it even work? Do they transfer gcloud credits to you? Do you use their gcloud account to make a maps app?

beering 7y ago
It's Google's strategy for selling Maps and maybe some other enterprise services. I think it makes sense, actually. The reseller deals with things like basic support, consulting, drafting up contracts, limited negotiations, etc., basically the sort of high-touch stuff we know Google hasn't always been great at. The reseller infra is built into Maps, so you still work with your own Google account, but you pay the reseller. It's not fully in gcloud, afaik, since I remember there being a Salesforce portal you had to use to manage your Maps premium account.
- wolco 7y ago
  SugarCRM does this. I don't like the setup when support is required because the reseller tries to sell additional products.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Holy shit that's the worst when you're barely holding on trying to get through support tickets, but management wants you to side-sell as well.
jimktrains2 7y ago
They do the same, have authorized partners who you buy through, for analytics.

sebasmurphy 7y ago

Their documentation seems to be lacking as of late or at least the last time I checked. I was attempting to get geocoding working on a project and was having a hell of time getting the api keys issued with the correct permissions. Swapped over to mapbox and had everything working in a few minutes.

crazygringo 7y ago

> ...people at educational institutions (even not-for-profit ones, like mine) are disqualified from applying. Why? Because Google wants to capture the educational market in a revenue-generating way, and so directs you to their Google for Education site, which as you will quickly find is based on a very different sort of model. ...you have to claim you are representing an entire educational institution (I am not) and that you are interested in implementing Google’s products on your campus (I am not), and if you do all this (as I did, just to get through to them) you can finally talk to them a bit. The base Google for Education used by most educational institutions has always been free, it's not revenue-generating. And even if the author had gone the non-profit route, Google for Nonprofits is the same -- you have to represent your entire nonprofit institution. Because when you're part of a large institution, your institution is responsible for licensing, grants, policies, etc. Google (justifiably) doesn't want to deal with 100 different professors setting up 100 different free quotas and not talking to each other. They want it to all be tracked at an institution level.

yborg 7y ago
Professors are accustomed to requesting grants from individual entities all the time and while they may often have internal institutional review or coordination, the granting entities don't typically require all requests from say Harvard to be submitted by Harvard as an institution. tl;dr professors are used to submitting proposals for grants directly to an organization, Google's approach at least in higher education would not be what a professor would consider the norm.

underbluewaters 7y ago

As a software developer for a lab within a big University, I appreciate the bit about Google offering edu discounts, but only if working with a representative _for the entire institution_. A lot of big companies offer discounts this way and it is maddening. There are so many different development projects within a university setting and they often operate with zero involvement of campus IT. It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license.

skrebbel 7y ago
> It's like expecting a foreign company to involve their federal government in purchasing a software license. I love this analogy. Also please let me pick a nit: It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a federation!
- naniwaduni 7y ago
  Bizarrely, there's no good word for "pertaining to a country". The likely preferred option "national" is subject to a similar objection ("It gets even worse when said foreign country isn't a nation!"--not all countries are nation-states, and we have more than one salient example in the anglosphere!), and "state" has the unfortunate property of meaning something very different to an American.
  - bryanrasmussen 7y ago
    >there's no good word for "pertaining to a country" In English, the question then becomes "Where are we going to import this word from?"
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    "National" is a weird word in English, because it doesn't typically mean "pertaining to the entire nation" but more like "pertaining to the entire country". I think it's usually the proper term. It translates to "country-al" in the other languages I know. That said, I don't know about the UK. If a Londoner talks about the "national level", is that England or the UK? Oh damn I'm wrong and starting to see your point. Eg in German, "land" refers specifically to the federal state and not the federation. You need to use bundessomethingsomething to address all of Germany. Weird stuff! EDIT suddenly I realize how weird a name the UN has. There's not really any proper nation states left in the word. Bhutan maybe? I have no idea, but I like to think that it would've been the United Countries but then Scotland would've wanted a seat.

buboard 7y ago

google's business is ads, monopoly ads, and all these side projects were good for distracting people from their monopoly. they don't care because they don't need to care and i wouldnt be surprised if all their services incl. gmail have the same fate. good thing that the market abhors a vacuum

xvector 7y ago
> good thing that the market abhors a vacuum Indeed. I greatly prefer Apple Maps on iOS. The directions barely take any longer and the UX is just so much better.
- ViViDboarder 7y ago
  The new voice prompts on Apple Maps are great. “Turn right at the next stop sign” is way more helpful than “In 1000 feet, turn right”
  - wolco 7y ago
    If they combined them turn right next stop sign about a thousand feet. Otherwise it's like this stop sign here or do they mean that one..
    - dbt00 7y ago
      They say things like turn left at the second light.

seshagiric 7y ago

Since the Google Maps price hike, there are a number of such projects that have got affected. However I am curious why no one seems to be considering Bing Maps (from Microsoft) at all?? Bing Maps actually has a pretty decent free usage quota that should fit most such projects (either free or low cost).

nxc18 7y ago
Not even Azure uses Bing Maps. Instead of using their own existing mapping platform, Microsoft created Azure Maps, complete with a totally independent data store, rendering, etc. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I miss the Bing maps that was innovating and delivering regularly, but I haven't taken them seriously since 2016 at least; this is coming from a former Bing fanboy. edit - links: * Azure Maps: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-maps/ * Bing Maps: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-api https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/choose-your-bing-maps-a...
- throwawayGMaps 7y ago
  From their copyrights, it looks like - Azure uses TomTom - Bing uses HERE (formerly Navteq/Nokia) Did Microsoft buy all of Nokia? Or just their phone business?
  - nxc18 7y ago
    Microsoft only bought parts. HERE has been its own thing for a while now. https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/here-and-microsoft-extend-mapping-deal-expanding-into-connected-car-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/15/here-and-microsoft-extend-... Related - Uber hired/bought many of the engineers and assets involved in Bing Maps' data: https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-bings-mapping-assets-will-absorb-around-100-microsoft-employees/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/uber-acquires-part-of-bing...

mrtri 7y ago

because nukes dont exists, research it, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compare it with photos of Tokyo, almost the same damage, flat with some trees and buildings standing.. no crater, no radiation, how can trees and building survive at groundzero? undamaged buildings, and bridges at groundzero but miles away from center concrete buildings collapsed , blown away . no radiation problem, they started walking around and started rebuilding the cities just days after. search hiroshima Tram that restarted service just 3 days after the bombing. nuclear tests are fake with huge pile of normal explosives, and some hollywood editing. all fake. you can see clouds not moving because they use layers, and colors dont match.

tssva 7y ago

The average after financial aid per student cost to attend Stevens Institute of Technology is $35k. As of 2017 they had an endowment of $184 million dollars. If they thought this was enough of a priority they could allocate the additional funding for this. The fact that they haven't and that the lower $200 a month was coming out of pocket versus being paid by Stevens indicates the level of importance they place on this work. Why should Google in essence help fund work that the organization doing the work can afford to but doesn't want to fund?

detaro 7y ago
> I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with an institution (my employers, the College of Arts and Letters at the Stevens Institute of Technology) that was willing to foot the bill.

spaethnl 7y ago

I develop an application at a university that allows users to share and lookup accessibility information on public places that uses Google Maps and the Google Places API. We have run in to exactly the same issues as described in this post and we have had a few meetings on what to do about it. I would like to switch to OSM but I haven't been able to find a quality replacement for the Google Places API, which is critical to our application. We could switch to using OSM + Places, to at least partially alleviate our problem, except that Google requires any Google Places API results that are displayed on a map to be displayed on a Google Map, which really locks us in. Is anyone aware of a good Google Places API alternative, including any paid self-hosted databases?

nathancahill 7y ago
What type of accessibility information are you getting back from the Places API? OSM seems like a great fit for this since information is tagged in a structured way: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disabilities Feel free to email me, this is my area of expertise. For projects like that I can often help pro-bono.
- spaethnl 7y ago
  We actually aren't using the accessibility data from the Places API, we are collecting and displaying custom data that is provided by users (detailed ratings, reviews and pictures from regular users, and highly detailed building assessments from trained users). We only need the places API for having a comprehensive list of nearby places. Other services had too few places in general, but didn't necessarily lack information about the places that were available.
- spaethnl 7y ago
  I just spent some more time looking at OSM's place data, and I'm not sure if more has been added since last looking at it, or if I wasn't using it correctly, but it seems to have more than I remember. I see that a couple of popular restaurants that have been around for at least a decade are still not shown, but maybe that is anomalous? I'll have to re-consider OSM.

WD-42 7y ago

In this post the author speaks a lot to how inaccessible Google is for any kind of support. This is one of the under appreciate reasons NOT to use services provided by the big cloud providers: AWS, GCP, etc. I recently started a small SASS project for a client and decided that Heroku would be a good fit for the situation. That led me to use smaller independent service providers like Mailgun for email, Mapbox for maps, Transloadit for video encoding. I haven't needed much support but when I have I actually talk to real people (and developers on the other end). It's a very pleasant experience. I get much more of a feeling that they actually care about developers using their products. Plus it feels "good" to be supporting independent shops, instead of giant tech monoliths. Consolidated billing can be annoying if you decide to go with many smaller, independent providers. At least Heroku covers that well.

MiroF 7y ago
It's crazy the extent to which for big companies this experience is different. The large tech company that I work for has AWS developers& support lingering in dedicated Slack channels on our company Slack where they will help talk you through any issues and keep you updated on feature requests/bugs moving through the Amazon system.
- celim307 7y ago
  yeah but Enterprise level support with TAM's cost upwards of 15k a month. That's pretty prohibitive for most small startups
  - specialp 7y ago
    You can pay $100/10% a month on Amazon and get good support. They will debug and guide you on. Hiring someone with the expertise you get would cost magnitudes of order more. And if your enterprise is at the level where it warrants 15k a month support, it is still worth it. Considering that still would barely get you only one skilled person hired.
    - 7y ago

ilaksh 7y ago

Google wanting to get paid for use of its APIs doesn't seem like the most significant aspect of this post to me. I hope some of us are able to escape from this planet before it is destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. This is why I think that the lunar and mars missions should be a bigger priority.

incompatible 7y ago
I suspect that even after a nuclear war, Earth will still be far more inhabitable than either the Moon or Mars.

upofadown 7y ago

>But in 2018, Google changes its pricing model, and my bill jumped to more like $1,800 per month. Presumably, Google has done the market research here and had found that this level of pricing will end up maximizing revenue. It would be interesting to have a generally accepted model for these no money now, money later business models based on some measure of industry lock in. That way it would be possible to do the pricing at the start of a project rather than part of the way through when everyone had forgotten to budget anything. The Googles of the world get to know how much our projects are going to cost, why can't we at least get an idea?

TheRealPomax 7y ago
That presumes a project starts with people who intend to charge from the get-go, but defer that step to later. Rather than being started by folks who love what they're doing, getting funneled into a PM'ed project where the enthusiasm is curbed by "product viability", and then goes through a period of a few years where the original project folks rotate out until no one left is invested in how useful the product is, and a lot of folks are invested in how much money can be made by pivoting to a model that heavily monetizes on scoping down to purely the most used features used by its biggest, financially secure customers.
- takeda 7y ago
  That reminded me of a project where person leading it estimated that it will be cheaper and faster to use AWS, they only forgot all the hidden fees that AWS adds, most commonly the network fees (which are charged between AZs) or EBS etc. On top of that an instance that claims to have specific parameters won't deliver the same performance as supposedly equivalent physical machine, so you will need to use bigger instances etc. Ultimately the project did not have resources to set up DR version which was originally planned and still went way over the budget.

SeanFerree 7y ago

Very interesting!

kuroguro 7y ago

If you're not afraid of breaching Google's ToS you can load Google tiles directly with leaflet. The tiles themselves have no API key requirement. Obviously not a proper solution both legally and technically as the routes are undocumented and can change at any time (tho I've seen only 1 major change in the past ~7 years).

Diesel555 7y ago

I switched from Google Maps to Apple's Mapkit JS. It's awesome. And they respond to bug reports and make quick fixes. https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/ https://developer.apple.com/maps/web/

saagarjha 7y ago
Like, Feedback Assistant reports?

lemoncucumber 7y ago

> [B]ut they do have a way to request discounted access to the Google Cloud Platform, which appears to be some kind of machine-learning platform This line in the article made me laugh out loud. GCP is a full blown competitor to AWS, but it sounds like whatever marketing page the author landed on is hyping machine learning so much that they didn't even realize that.

FpUser 7y ago

For business, dedicated servers are the only thing I am paying for (also mirrored on me on premises). Well there is still some storage fees from Mediafire but I am in a process of moving it to dedicates servers as well. Following few very unpleasant experiences with the cloudy stuff I've develop a simple rule. NOTHING gets done/developed for my businesses until I can run it on premises and rented dedicated servers.

tpmx 7y ago

The general underlying reason: Google has shifted from the innovation/growth phase run by engineers to the MBA/marketing/lawyer-managed monetization phase.

ysopex 7y ago
Thank you, I was about to comment it's not a service it's a product. And frankly this has always been the case they were just more subtle about it in the past.

Symmetry 7y ago

I'm excited to hear about the new fallout feature in Nukemap.

fastball 7y ago

I feel that the author is seriously underestimating the cost of his traffic to the Google Maps API.

Qub3d 7y ago

>It’s that they push out new products, encourage communities to use them to make “amazing” things, and then don’t support them well over the long term. They let cool projects atrophy and die. This is the absolute root of the problem, and one that is unique to Google among the big cloud providers. Yes, AWS may roll out new features, but generally the core stuff stays put. I'm not losing sleep over route 53 getting "sunset" with a 1 month notice. Can't say the same about Google. While it won't sink them, I can see this becoming a bigger and bigger obstacle as the number of IT pros who get caught in the fallout of Google's internal ADHD grows. If Google, or a vendor using a product on top of Google services contacts me, I'm not touching it unless they're willing to enter into an SLA where they pay for the trouble of migrating my stuff when they axe the service. In other words, I'm not using it, because no one would ever offer such a thing.

mesoman 7y ago
It's internal Aspergers, not just ADHD. Google seems to have no insight into its users.

nik736 7y ago

We switched to Mapbox as well, the only downside we faced was the horrendous satelitte maps. They apperantly bought a lot of satellite imagery, but it still looks way way worse compared to Google or Apple Maps. The weird thing is that when zooming in it gets pixelated, even though the maps actually look more crisp when not zoomed in completely.

jeen02 7y ago
The streets are pretty offset as well :(

chihuahua 7y ago

There is something called "Here maps" that's a pretty good alternative to Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps for mobile phones. Obviously that's not what Nukemap is talking about, but for those who are frustrated with the shortcomings of those 3 apps, "Here WeGo" is a free Android/iOS app. It was developed by Nokia and then sold off. I like it because I can download an entire state with just a few clicks. And the UI isn't cluttered by "explore your neighborhood" nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_WeGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_WeGo

henriks 7y ago
Here wasn’t really developed by Nokia; it existed as Navteq before Nokia bought it in the 00’s and was headquartered in Chicago. At some point at least they were a fairly big player in in-car navigation systems.

rotrux 7y ago

Google maps is only profitable on the basis of advertising syndication & data collection. If you're not pumping google information about how people are using your map service or directing people to the sites of google's ads customers, they are probably losing money by serving you. The issue is similar to the one that ruined their custom search offering: it doesn't make them enough money to justify its existence as anything more than a public service. Unless charity is what Google had in mind when they launched the api, their behavior makes business sense.

perspective1 7y ago

Kind of predictable. Google's a business. Surprise, surprise, you can't rely on its free services long-term.

pbw 7y ago

Google has 100,000 employees not one can offer up anything in defense of their pricing? That's sad, I'm sure they have some explanation for what they did, and why they did it, and how they want things to evolve from here. Would be nice to hear something even if it was PR laden. This pricing hike is over a year and old and everywhere I see complaints and about it and not a shred of explanation from them. I'd expect something like "Yes Google Maps was free for a long time, but it's a very expensive service to run, for the service to exist long term we needed to increase the cost. Here are some resources how to contain your costs. Here is how to apply to be a non-profit." I have to believe there are hundreds of people at Google who fully understand this has ruined many people's projects, do they not feel some obligation to at least open up a channel of communication? Seems like a no-brainer. Or are they just so embarrassed and so wracked with in-fighting that they can't stomach even authoring a post?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nojvek 7y ago
I'm sure Google employees are probably not allowed to comment on HN without legal approval. BigCos have a lot of red-tape for communication.

jaquers 7y ago

Lots of comments (bitching) here about not showing street names. Can confirm, there are definitely bugs regarding street names being off-screen / not showing at the right zoom levels. But are we technologists, or what? Figure out the behavior and suggest a solution. I find that it happens to throw street names close to major intersections, which happen to be offscreen due to panning. Seems to me that there could be a change to detect when a street name is not present on the screen and make an adjustment to do the same. In other words tweak the heuristic for showing names +- zoom level. They do have _a lot_ of data. I think it's really popular to hate on Google right now for a myriad of reasons—but I also think that people who work on Gmaps want to improve their product. Y'all know how to file bug reports. Expected behavior, current behavior, steps to reproduce, etc. Stop complaining about a service that is free, or else—don't use it. BTW; agree w/ the majority of OP's points regarding contacting humans & lack of features / price etc for API. That's valid feedback.

jaimex2 7y ago

Google's pricing change is a really good thing. Diversity is needed on the Internet and since their changes things like MapBox and OSM have had a big increase in uptake.

shreyamathur651 7y ago

Use Google Maps In Google Chrome Browser! You will defined able to find the Nukemap

Uptrenda 7y ago

1. Give product away at a loss / or even for free. 2. People say 'great', and start taking advantage of it. 3. Competitors (for profit) can't keep up and slowly stop offering products. 4. Over time the majority of the market is capture by a single company. 5. People become overly dependent on that company, allowing them to build an even bigger, better 'moat', and discouraging any new competitors from emerging. 6. $$$$$$$$$ Prices get jacked up. Customers have no alternatives. Kind of like an army besieging a walled city. A company doesn't need to build the best product or have the best fighters to win. They just need enough resources to outlast the competition and they automatically get access to the left-overs.

stoolpigeon 7y ago
In the linked post he states that the changes mystify him because there are alternatives. So if Google is following the plan you've laid out, they are not doing it well.

forrestthewoods 7y ago

I wrote a commute visualizer. Imho it’s better than anything else widely available - free or paid. Given a home/office it can visualize commute times for multiple modes of transit. Google’s new pricing scheme makes it cost multiple dollars for a single map. Their new pricing scheme is beyond absurd and has no basis in reality.

alexellisuk 7y ago

What are the main limitations of OpenStreetMaps here? I used Google Maps back when the pricing was at that lower point, and am working with Mapbox now for a project.

heisenbit 7y ago

Taking the power e.g. search, the profits from one domain e.g. advertisement and going into another domain e.g. 2-D maps and charging nothing or little until competition has thinned and dominant position has been achieved and then raising prizes tenfold is the sort of behavior regulators find interesting.

nojvek 7y ago
Unfortunately US regulators are too sissy (or probably already in bed with the big corps) unlike the old days where Microsoft was getting sued left and right due to antitrust violations.

daveheq 7y ago

I dont know why the author can't download a cached map every month and use that for the hits.

nojvek 7y ago

> They clearly don’t care about small developers. That much is pretty obvious if you’ve tried to develop with their products. Look, I get that licensing to big corporations is the money-maker. But Google pretends to be developing for more than just them… they just don’t follow through on those hopes. That is really true. Google isn't for the small devs anymore, they're too big to care about us. They need to cross that trillion dollar mark and it seems everything's about profits right now. Lesson: Don't even touch google apis unless you're a really large corporation willing to spend >10k per month. Even if you're a really large corporation, have a plan B, because google will still fuck you over with their APIs changing without much notice.

aagha 7y ago

It's frustrating that with the number of Google engineers out there--many of which reach HN--to not see any comments from them about a post like this. It's almost as if they don't care, or are now worried that saying something could negatively impact them.