11 ms·

Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish

536 points by dlikhten 15y ago

drewda 15y ago
"TL;DR: We at StreetEasy decided to build our own maps using, among other tools, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox and Leaflet, instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to Google. And yes, the money pushed us into doing it, but we're happier with the result because we now control the contents of our maps."
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Charging is good since it keeps the product around, but Google's prices seem ramp up suddenly from free to way too high suddenly. First Appspot and now this, looks like their pricing is too out of line for small to medium companies. They need a flatter pricing curve.
- angkec 15y ago
  Agreed. They effectively pushed my startup from Appspot to Heroku.
- omfg 15y ago
  I don't think they really care. In the current landscape, Google Maps is a competitive advantage for them and the less people using it the better. They leverage it across the Android ecosystem, their new social network, etc.. and it creates more work for their competitors to play catch up.
  - Confusion 15y ago
    the less people using it the better How is that? I would say the marginal cost of extra users is minimal, especially given their (lack of) customer service.
    - Drbble 15y ago
      Parent means that less API users (product competitors) is better, not less end users.
      - gcb 15y ago
        Maybe not... This thread got me wondering, one of the points in the article is "why pay to have sites that look the same as the rest" Maybe google prices is to remove gmaps from everywhere and sell only to premium sites. If they disappear users are already hooked and will migrate to the premium sites that still have it
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Jeng 15y ago
  Perhaps it is Googles way of not becoming a monopoly in a market segment? By charging high prices for their solutions they end up fostering mom and pop solutions which would otherwise not have a chance. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
terinjokes 15y ago
Moving the map around causes it to go black here in Chrome 18. But other than that (with might be Chrome's fought), I think the maps look pretty nice.
- tmcw 15y ago
  Sounds like you're on the current nightly. The bug was introduced this morning by Chrome, and affects a large class of webkit-transform CSS. Like other Chrome bugs, I expect it to soon be replaced by a new bug.
vijayr 15y ago
Google charging heavily for maps is a good thing, in a way - more alternatives will come up, which are (hopefully) cheaper, and not locked to one company's whims
kooshball 15y ago
I really wish there is a way to show more than just the domain name next to the title. >Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish (google.com) is simply misleading.
- dpcan 15y ago
  Also not on the topic of the article, but... I wish people would stop blogging on Google plus. Period. It's the worst reading experience ever on the iPhone - nearly impossible as the text blurs, and you have to drag the article around to see it all and then wait for the blur to go away.
  - baddox 15y ago
    What causes that text blurring on iOS devices? I've encountered it on TechCrunch as well. By the way, Hacker News is fairly unreadable on an iPhone because the text is so small text width so great. I haven't found a mobile interface that allows me to log in and comment.
    - hendzen 15y ago
      There's a paid app called news.yc that is the best HN app out there for iOS. Well worth the 2 bucks.
    - vetler 15y ago
      Try Opera Mini. Not everyone likes it on iOS, though, but when you zoom in it will nicely reformat the text so you don't neet to scroll.
  - cryptoz 15y ago
    Does the iPhone not open Google Plus posts in the Google Plus app? Or do you not have it installed? The reason your experience is awful is because Google doesn't care to make the G+ mobile web experience perfect since their app is the way to go. On Android, when I click one of these links it opens the app and the reading experience is very pleasant. Maybe I've just been spoiled, but I find the experience to be pretty good. Edit: Also, I think it's kind of silly that you wish people would stop publicly posting on Google Plus due to your phone experience being subpar. I think the problem lies much more with you and your phone than it does with Google Plus as a writing platform.
wildmXranat 15y ago
And about the price, what are the bills like now ?
- magicalist 15y ago
  I'd really like to know that too. It can't be too cheap to serve that many views reliably and quickly. OTOH, they are just NYC and they were already doing some things (like geocoding) themselves, while the google maps price included features they would never use (even implicitly, eg the cost of acquiring street data in other countries has to be figured into google's cost structure).
  - sdelmont 15y ago
    we expect it will be under $1,000 per month... depending on traffic, since it's mostly connected to bandwidth serving the tiles.
- mikerg87 15y ago
  It sounds like it was going to be around $200-300,000 a year after a discount was applied from the google sales staff. With the other numbers bandied about in the text it sounds like that represents a 50% discount based on their current and projected usage.
demetris 15y ago
A similar story on HN from a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 – Why (and how) we've switched away from Google Maps (nestoria.co.uk)
7952 15y ago
It would be interesting to see if this effects the success of the site. Despite its failing people are really comfortable with google maps.
funkah 15y ago
Interesting. After years of paying through the nose for a Google search appliance that actually wasn't very good, my company decided to replace it with Solr, and it was a really fun project. We hired the Solr project's main committer to consult with us and in the process submitted patches for bugs that we ran into. The whole thing cost less than one year of the GSA license fee, we can search all of our content (the GSA had a hard limit on the number of documents it would index), and the search results are way better.
jcampbell1 15y ago
The maps do not show subway stop locations. That is not good when you are a NYC real estate company.
- terinjokes 15y ago
  But they mention that in the text. Sure it's not something that happens now, but since now they generate the maps, they can add them or anything else they want to add to the maps.
- zackola 15y ago
  Rest assured that we will be adding the subway stops and various other awesome related data sets shortly.
  - ubercore 15y ago
    Not to sound like a downer, because I really appreciate open source mapping, but that's the part where I think the costs, long term, will swing back. Google maps is deceptively simple, in that the javascript library and tiling is a relatively solved problem. Google has the best datasets, and the best large-data know-how in the business, so outsourcing things like an up-to-date transit location and route database is built into that seemingly large cost. What if you want to offer transit directions from your location to a rental? Again, sorry if this sounds like I'm poo-poo'ing your effort; that's not my intention. I think there's another side to this story, though. EDIT: Forgot to mention my own personal white whale. Google's geocoder is far from perfect, but it's the best I've seen. I worked for years with them, and none of the open source geocoders (or expensive ESRI products) could deal with addresses like Google's. Geocoding is like web WYSIWYG editors; they all suck, but some suck less than others. And everyone thinks they can do it better.
    - jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
      They should merge efforts with other companies who also need alternatives to Google Map and create their own always-updated map navigator.
dhcole 15y ago
This a great overview of the open source mapping options out there. I just posted some notes the other day on how MapBox pricing works for hosting custom map tiles: http://ds.io/A12Drf http://ds.io/A12Drf and a comparison of overage fees for MapBox premium accounts vs Google premier.
Roboprog 15y ago
The take away I got is that Google maps is a very good way to implement a map tile on your pages if you are a startup, one less thing to worry about, but if you succeed, be prepared to "optimize" the cost of that portion later. The per-unit cost is a steep slope, once you start to get volume. Fair enough. No way would I try to make my own map at the beginning of a project.
- freyfogle 15y ago
  You don't need to make your own map. MapQuest serves very nice OSM tiles for free. See how we did it using MapQuest here http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-ma http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-fr... Then later if you feel like it you can switch to your own tiles
sunchild 15y ago
Does anyone know how Google's new pricing affects use of MapKit in iOS apps?
- marcins 15y ago
  I would assume Apple's existing licence with Google for using Maps covers this.
mikecx 15y ago
Another option, though still expensive, is to use the Google Earth Enterprise tools. They basically let you build your own private Google Maps though this too runs into some problems. 1.) Imagery, 2.) Cost for GEE ($10k I think), and the cost of maintaining your own servers to host it on. I think it's still cheaper than going over the 20,000 free, but not optimal either.
- count 15y ago
  My understanding is that GEE still requires the Google Earth plugin, and will not do a 'google maps' style interface?
rplnt 15y ago
What about bing? Compared to Google Maps in terms of pricing? I think their maps are of great quality as well, much superior to OSM. In US at least.
blhack 15y ago
Could somebody explain to me how google charges for maps? I'm using it for http://lanmarks.com/ http://lanmarks.com/ -- and it's not like I'm throwing an API key at them with the javascript include...
- sdelmont 15y ago
  it's tied to the domain name of the page including the maps javascript (that is, the referrer for that JS request)
- cullenking 15y ago
  Start using an API key - you can then use their API console to track your usage, and you'll actually get notifications of overages, impending shutoff etc. Much better than flying blind.
kuahyeow 15y ago
It's a very overview of the current open source map technologies out there. People may be talking a lot about the price, but my feeling is that the next batch of map servers etc are catering to a major set of folks who wish to diverge from the stock standard Google Maps look and functionality. The technology is simplifying the whole process of generating and rendering maps quite a bit - comes with it's trade-offs of course. For those requiring a step or two above a simple basic map yet wish to have more customization over what's in the map tile, it's perfect - processing times are getting less, and the technology is becoming less arcane to understand
aasarava 15y ago
Does anyone have any pointers to tutorials on how to get started building OSM maps? For example, if I have my own "map" of the US (a simple graphic image), how do I go about connecting that up to state boundaries and plotting lat/long on it, and then breaking it all up into tiles? I feel like that part of the puzzle is always missing from blog posts like these (though the post is helpful for the bigger infrastructure picture.)
- notaddicted 15y ago
  This isn't 100% what you're asking about, but http://mapsfromscratch.com/ http://mapsfromscratch.com/ has instructions for how to render and server map tiles, where you basically control the whole stack.
- saras 15y ago
  While notaddicted's reply can also be useful to you, I think the part of the puzzle that you are missing is "georeferencing". From your example, with a raster (bitmap, image) map of the US: the part where you start connecting that to lat/lon is georeferencing. Essentially, you want to tie a spatial reference to your image, so that the raster's state boundaries will correspond to state boundaries on a "real" map. You can think of it as pinning an image you know nothing about to a map you do know something about, and then copying the information from known to unknown. There are plenty of ways to georeference an image. The easiest would be to use something like QGIS or GRASS (both opensource GIS software). You will need existing spatial data to base your (as of now, non-spatial) map on: a shapefile of the state boundaries would work great. Once you've wrapped your head around georeferencing and the idea of spatial vs nonspatial data, you will probably get more out of the mapsfromscratch tutorial.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ma2rten 15y ago
This might just be a matter of taste or just what I am used to, but I have yet to see another online map, that looks as good as Google Maps. Do others have a different option about this? Btw, when Google announced it's ridiculous new pricing scheme for Google Maps, I though maybe they actually just wanted to force people to become Google Maps Premier costumers. I mean, no way they really except people to pay that much. So I am really curious if their Premier program is actually less expensive. Did you actually contact Google Sales about it?
jsnell 15y ago
When those prices were announced, I was really expecting that they were just for show, and really everybody would end up paying way less than list price. It's bizarre that this isn't happening. Making a real and profitable business out of providing a geo API is great. Pricing it out of just about everyone's range and driving the potential customers away, less so. I can come up with a lot of theories, but none that is really believable: 1. So many companies really paying nearly list price that it's worth losing the other business. 2. Using different pricing schemes on different customers to figure out what the pain threshold really is, to maximize profit. 3. The sales people have a bad set of incentives, and are too strongly encouraged to try to make sales with low discounts. 4. ?
jroseattle 15y ago
The most telling part of this experience was the discovery of how good open source mapping has become lately. While it's the money that's forcing developers to look for alternative mapping solutions, it's also unleashing a wave of interest in open source maps. Those will undoubtedly get better as time passes. I do believe Google will look back on the decision to start charging for their map products at the levels chosen as a bad one for themselves, but a great one for open source.
kapitalx 15y ago
> they might have bad data, and there's very little you can do about it except report it and wait You can actually go to Google MapMaker and modify things yourself. I've fixed many things to date. http://www.google.com/mapmaker http://www.google.com/mapmaker
ajtaylor 15y ago
Thanks for all the excellent pointers, some of which I knew but most I did not. I'm happy things turned out so well for you. We recently had to navigate the Google Maps licensing obstacle course at $work. I tried getting quotes from Bing, but it was just as hard to get a number since we could only go through resellers. In the end we negotiated down a bit and reduced our map usage. But the next go around I'm seriously considering taking some time to investigate doing the maps ourselves. TileMill looks gorgeous!
pud 15y ago
Fortunately Google Maps' geocoding API limits still appear to be based on IP address. So if you do your API requests via client-side AJAX, you should be fine. That's because it's unlikely any individual user will make more than 25,000 requests in a day.
- tmcw 15y ago
  Almost: unfortunately via the terms, you need to display the geocoding results on a Google Map. > Note: the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited. from: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ So, though the limit is technically lower, it's practically and legally quite the same.
fludlight 15y ago
Where does the data for building shapes come from? Both Google Maps and the OP's website incorporate it. What is the format? Can I download the raw data in bulk (preferably for free) for a data mining project?
- jc4p 15y ago
  By shapes do you mean borders? Or do you mean buildings and things... The borders come from http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ which is editable/exportable in many formats.
  - fludlight 15y ago
    Yes...borders. Open Street Map looks like it only provides 2D building borders while Google has 3D. Google doesn't even provide an API for accessing it. Bing also only has 2D building boundary data, albeit at a slightly higher level of detail than OSM. Is there an open source database for the 3D data or is that proprietary Google info? Is OSM the only source for free building boundary data?
vedant 15y ago
Douglas Adams is rolling over at this title. It should be "So Long, Google Maps..."
muyuu 15y ago
I'm starting to get worried about the long-term plans Google might have for the apps I use that I'm rather locked-in to. Mainly gmail.
RobertKohr 15y ago
I think you ment "So Long, ..." Anyway, good for google for charging for something. I don't see why it should be free. But it was a blunder to charge this much from the start. It seems like they want to get rid of customers.

536 points by dlikhten 15y ago

"TL;DR: We at StreetEasy decided to build our own maps using, among other tools, OpenStreetMap, TileMill, MapBox and Leaflet, instead of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to Google. And yes, the money pushed us into doing it, but we're happier with the result because we now control the contents of our maps."

recoiledsnake 15y ago

Charging is good since it keeps the product around, but Google's prices seem ramp up suddenly from free to way too high suddenly. First Appspot and now this, looks like their pricing is too out of line for small to medium companies. They need a flatter pricing curve.

angkec 15y ago
Agreed. They effectively pushed my startup from Appspot to Heroku.
omfg 15y ago
I don't think they really care. In the current landscape, Google Maps is a competitive advantage for them and the less people using it the better. They leverage it across the Android ecosystem, their new social network, etc.. and it creates more work for their competitors to play catch up.
- Confusion 15y ago
  the less people using it the better How is that? I would say the marginal cost of extra users is minimal, especially given their (lack of) customer service.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    Parent means that less API users (product competitors) is better, not less end users.
    - gcb 15y ago
      Maybe not... This thread got me wondering, one of the points in the article is "why pay to have sites that look the same as the rest" Maybe google prices is to remove gmaps from everywhere and sell only to premium sites. If they disappear users are already hooked and will migrate to the premium sites that still have it
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Jeng 15y ago
Perhaps it is Googles way of not becoming a monopoly in a market segment? By charging high prices for their solutions they end up fostering mom and pop solutions which would otherwise not have a chance. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

terinjokes 15y ago

Moving the map around causes it to go black here in Chrome 18. But other than that (with might be Chrome's fought), I think the maps look pretty nice.

tmcw 15y ago
Sounds like you're on the current nightly. The bug was introduced this morning by Chrome, and affects a large class of webkit-transform CSS. Like other Chrome bugs, I expect it to soon be replaced by a new bug.

vijayr 15y ago

Google charging heavily for maps is a good thing, in a way - more alternatives will come up, which are (hopefully) cheaper, and not locked to one company's whims

kooshball 15y ago

I really wish there is a way to show more than just the domain name next to the title. >Good bye, Google Maps… thanks for all the fish (google.com) is simply misleading.

dpcan 15y ago
Also not on the topic of the article, but... I wish people would stop blogging on Google plus. Period. It's the worst reading experience ever on the iPhone - nearly impossible as the text blurs, and you have to drag the article around to see it all and then wait for the blur to go away.
- baddox 15y ago
  What causes that text blurring on iOS devices? I've encountered it on TechCrunch as well. By the way, Hacker News is fairly unreadable on an iPhone because the text is so small text width so great. I haven't found a mobile interface that allows me to log in and comment.
  - hendzen 15y ago
    There's a paid app called news.yc that is the best HN app out there for iOS. Well worth the 2 bucks.
  - vetler 15y ago
    Try Opera Mini. Not everyone likes it on iOS, though, but when you zoom in it will nicely reformat the text so you don't neet to scroll.
- cryptoz 15y ago
  Does the iPhone not open Google Plus posts in the Google Plus app? Or do you not have it installed? The reason your experience is awful is because Google doesn't care to make the G+ mobile web experience perfect since their app is the way to go. On Android, when I click one of these links it opens the app and the reading experience is very pleasant. Maybe I've just been spoiled, but I find the experience to be pretty good. Edit: Also, I think it's kind of silly that you wish people would stop publicly posting on Google Plus due to your phone experience being subpar. I think the problem lies much more with you and your phone than it does with Google Plus as a writing platform.

wildmXranat 15y ago

And about the price, what are the bills like now ?

magicalist 15y ago
I'd really like to know that too. It can't be too cheap to serve that many views reliably and quickly. OTOH, they are just NYC and they were already doing some things (like geocoding) themselves, while the google maps price included features they would never use (even implicitly, eg the cost of acquiring street data in other countries has to be figured into google's cost structure).
- sdelmont 15y ago
  we expect it will be under $1,000 per month... depending on traffic, since it's mostly connected to bandwidth serving the tiles.
mikerg87 15y ago
It sounds like it was going to be around $200-300,000 a year after a discount was applied from the google sales staff. With the other numbers bandied about in the text it sounds like that represents a 50% discount based on their current and projected usage.

demetris 15y ago

A similar story on HN from a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392851 – Why (and how) we've switched away from Google Maps (nestoria.co.uk)

7952 15y ago

It would be interesting to see if this effects the success of the site. Despite its failing people are really comfortable with google maps.

funkah 15y ago

Interesting. After years of paying through the nose for a Google search appliance that actually wasn't very good, my company decided to replace it with Solr, and it was a really fun project. We hired the Solr project's main committer to consult with us and in the process submitted patches for bugs that we ran into. The whole thing cost less than one year of the GSA license fee, we can search all of our content (the GSA had a hard limit on the number of documents it would index), and the search results are way better.

jcampbell1 15y ago

The maps do not show subway stop locations. That is not good when you are a NYC real estate company.

terinjokes 15y ago
But they mention that in the text. Sure it's not something that happens now, but since now they generate the maps, they can add them or anything else they want to add to the maps.
zackola 15y ago
Rest assured that we will be adding the subway stops and various other awesome related data sets shortly.
- ubercore 15y ago
  Not to sound like a downer, because I really appreciate open source mapping, but that's the part where I think the costs, long term, will swing back. Google maps is deceptively simple, in that the javascript library and tiling is a relatively solved problem. Google has the best datasets, and the best large-data know-how in the business, so outsourcing things like an up-to-date transit location and route database is built into that seemingly large cost. What if you want to offer transit directions from your location to a rental? Again, sorry if this sounds like I'm poo-poo'ing your effort; that's not my intention. I think there's another side to this story, though. EDIT: Forgot to mention my own personal white whale. Google's geocoder is far from perfect, but it's the best I've seen. I worked for years with them, and none of the open source geocoders (or expensive ESRI products) could deal with addresses like Google's. Geocoding is like web WYSIWYG editors; they all suck, but some suck less than others. And everyone thinks they can do it better.
  - jQueryIsAwesome 15y ago
    They should merge efforts with other companies who also need alternatives to Google Map and create their own always-updated map navigator.

dhcole 15y ago

This a great overview of the open source mapping options out there. I just posted some notes the other day on how MapBox pricing works for hosting custom map tiles: http://ds.io/A12Drf http://ds.io/A12Drf and a comparison of overage fees for MapBox premium accounts vs Google premier.

Roboprog 15y ago

The take away I got is that Google maps is a very good way to implement a map tile on your pages if you are a startup, one less thing to worry about, but if you succeed, be prepared to "optimize" the cost of that portion later. The per-unit cost is a steep slope, once you start to get volume. Fair enough. No way would I try to make my own map at the beginning of a project.

freyfogle 15y ago
You don't need to make your own map. MapQuest serves very nice OSM tiles for free. See how we did it using MapQuest here http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-from-google-ma http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/why-and-how-weve-switched-away-fr... Then later if you feel like it you can switch to your own tiles

sunchild 15y ago

Does anyone know how Google's new pricing affects use of MapKit in iOS apps?

marcins 15y ago
I would assume Apple's existing licence with Google for using Maps covers this.

mikecx 15y ago

Another option, though still expensive, is to use the Google Earth Enterprise tools. They basically let you build your own private Google Maps though this too runs into some problems. 1.) Imagery, 2.) Cost for GEE ($10k I think), and the cost of maintaining your own servers to host it on. I think it's still cheaper than going over the 20,000 free, but not optimal either.

count 15y ago
My understanding is that GEE still requires the Google Earth plugin, and will not do a 'google maps' style interface?

rplnt 15y ago

What about bing? Compared to Google Maps in terms of pricing? I think their maps are of great quality as well, much superior to OSM. In US at least.

blhack 15y ago

Could somebody explain to me how google charges for maps? I'm using it for http://lanmarks.com/ http://lanmarks.com/ -- and it's not like I'm throwing an API key at them with the javascript include...

sdelmont 15y ago
it's tied to the domain name of the page including the maps javascript (that is, the referrer for that JS request)
cullenking 15y ago
Start using an API key - you can then use their API console to track your usage, and you'll actually get notifications of overages, impending shutoff etc. Much better than flying blind.

kuahyeow 15y ago

It's a very overview of the current open source map technologies out there. People may be talking a lot about the price, but my feeling is that the next batch of map servers etc are catering to a major set of folks who wish to diverge from the stock standard Google Maps look and functionality. The technology is simplifying the whole process of generating and rendering maps quite a bit - comes with it's trade-offs of course. For those requiring a step or two above a simple basic map yet wish to have more customization over what's in the map tile, it's perfect - processing times are getting less, and the technology is becoming less arcane to understand

aasarava 15y ago

Does anyone have any pointers to tutorials on how to get started building OSM maps? For example, if I have my own "map" of the US (a simple graphic image), how do I go about connecting that up to state boundaries and plotting lat/long on it, and then breaking it all up into tiles? I feel like that part of the puzzle is always missing from blog posts like these (though the post is helpful for the bigger infrastructure picture.)

notaddicted 15y ago
This isn't 100% what you're asking about, but http://mapsfromscratch.com/ http://mapsfromscratch.com/ has instructions for how to render and server map tiles, where you basically control the whole stack.
saras 15y ago
While notaddicted's reply can also be useful to you, I think the part of the puzzle that you are missing is "georeferencing". From your example, with a raster (bitmap, image) map of the US: the part where you start connecting that to lat/lon is georeferencing. Essentially, you want to tie a spatial reference to your image, so that the raster's state boundaries will correspond to state boundaries on a "real" map. You can think of it as pinning an image you know nothing about to a map you do know something about, and then copying the information from known to unknown. There are plenty of ways to georeference an image. The easiest would be to use something like QGIS or GRASS (both opensource GIS software). You will need existing spatial data to base your (as of now, non-spatial) map on: a shapefile of the state boundaries would work great. Once you've wrapped your head around georeferencing and the idea of spatial vs nonspatial data, you will probably get more out of the mapsfromscratch tutorial.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ma2rten 15y ago

This might just be a matter of taste or just what I am used to, but I have yet to see another online map, that looks as good as Google Maps. Do others have a different option about this? Btw, when Google announced it's ridiculous new pricing scheme for Google Maps, I though maybe they actually just wanted to force people to become Google Maps Premier costumers. I mean, no way they really except people to pay that much. So I am really curious if their Premier program is actually less expensive. Did you actually contact Google Sales about it?

jsnell 15y ago

When those prices were announced, I was really expecting that they were just for show, and really everybody would end up paying way less than list price. It's bizarre that this isn't happening. Making a real and profitable business out of providing a geo API is great. Pricing it out of just about everyone's range and driving the potential customers away, less so. I can come up with a lot of theories, but none that is really believable: 1. So many companies really paying nearly list price that it's worth losing the other business. 2. Using different pricing schemes on different customers to figure out what the pain threshold really is, to maximize profit. 3. The sales people have a bad set of incentives, and are too strongly encouraged to try to make sales with low discounts. 4. ?

jroseattle 15y ago

The most telling part of this experience was the discovery of how good open source mapping has become lately. While it's the money that's forcing developers to look for alternative mapping solutions, it's also unleashing a wave of interest in open source maps. Those will undoubtedly get better as time passes. I do believe Google will look back on the decision to start charging for their map products at the levels chosen as a bad one for themselves, but a great one for open source.

kapitalx 15y ago

> they might have bad data, and there's very little you can do about it except report it and wait You can actually go to Google MapMaker and modify things yourself. I've fixed many things to date. http://www.google.com/mapmaker http://www.google.com/mapmaker

ajtaylor 15y ago

Thanks for all the excellent pointers, some of which I knew but most I did not. I'm happy things turned out so well for you. We recently had to navigate the Google Maps licensing obstacle course at $work. I tried getting quotes from Bing, but it was just as hard to get a number since we could only go through resellers. In the end we negotiated down a bit and reduced our map usage. But the next go around I'm seriously considering taking some time to investigate doing the maps ourselves. TileMill looks gorgeous!

pud 15y ago

Fortunately Google Maps' geocoding API limits still appear to be based on IP address. So if you do your API requests via client-side AJAX, you should be fine. That's because it's unlikely any individual user will make more than 25,000 requests in a day.

tmcw 15y ago
Almost: unfortunately via the terms, you need to display the geocoding results on a Google Map. > Note: the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited. from: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/ So, though the limit is technically lower, it's practically and legally quite the same.

fludlight 15y ago

Where does the data for building shapes come from? Both Google Maps and the OP's website incorporate it. What is the format? Can I download the raw data in bulk (preferably for free) for a data mining project?

jc4p 15y ago
By shapes do you mean borders? Or do you mean buildings and things... The borders come from http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.openstreetmap.org/ which is editable/exportable in many formats.
- fludlight 15y ago
  Yes...borders. Open Street Map looks like it only provides 2D building borders while Google has 3D. Google doesn't even provide an API for accessing it. Bing also only has 2D building boundary data, albeit at a slightly higher level of detail than OSM. Is there an open source database for the 3D data or is that proprietary Google info? Is OSM the only source for free building boundary data?

vedant 15y ago

Douglas Adams is rolling over at this title. It should be "So Long, Google Maps..."

muyuu 15y ago

I'm starting to get worried about the long-term plans Google might have for the apps I use that I'm rather locked-in to. Mainly gmail.

RobertKohr 15y ago

I think you ment "So Long, ..." Anyway, good for google for charging for something. I don't see why it should be free. But it was a blunder to charge this much from the start. It seems like they want to get rid of customers.