10 ms·
Radar Maps Platform
- thatsnotmepls 3y agoWhat does it mean for a map to be vector based?
- nickpatrick 3y agoOld but good post on vector maps vs. raster maps from our friends at CARTO: https://carto.com/blog/raster-vs-vector-whats-the-difference-which-is-best https://carto.com/blog/raster-vs-vector-whats-the-difference...
- crustacean111 3y agoI believe it means vector-graphics based.
- yeskia 3y agoThis looks cool, but the pricing isn't exactly clear. Website says $0.50/1K API calls and then the HN title says $0.50/1K map loads. Is a map load === 1 API call?
- linsomniac 3y agoThe link says: Maps: $0.50/1K map loads. Geocoding: $0.50/1K API calls Halfway down the page under "Cut your maps bills in half" heading.
- nickpatrick 3y agoA map load is what it sounds like, an API call is a geocoding/search/routing API call. Pricing starts at $0.50 per 1K for both. Pricing page could be clearer, we're working on it!
- nickpatrick 3y agoRadar CEO here. Welcome any questions or feedback!
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoHow much is this compared to Google maps?
- nickpatrick 3y agoMore details in the post, but Google starts at $7 per 1K map loads and $5 per 1K geocoding API requests, whereas Radar starts at $0.50 per 1K for both. We've roughly been helping our enterprise customers cut their maps bill in half.
- DoesntMatter22 3y agoHey that is a fantastic price. I'll check it out, thx
- hackernewds 3y agoHow can you afford to be 10x cheaper? Google being overkill?
- nickpatrick 3y agoYou can charge a lot when you're #1.
- coder543 3y agoGoogle raised prices by 10x or 20x a few years ago, if I remember correctly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029
- Waterluvian 3y agoWould you consider an API for “style your own basemap” with your vector data? I sometimes find myself caring about if the basemaps look good and fit my use case more than the API cost.
- nickpatrick 3y ago
- kwerk 3y agoWow. I just hacked together a geo coding api myself for a project using postgis. Wish I’d seen this.
- Something1234 3y agoDo you have a static maps api I can push some geojson to draw over?
- timjulien 3y agoA static maps api that produces an image of the relevant vector tiles is on the near term roadmap (next 1-2 months). Can you say more about the geojson drawing part?
- jamesmstone 3y agoNot Something1234 but also interested in a feature like this https://docs.stadiamaps.com/static-maps/#example https://docs.stadiamaps.com/static-maps/#example
- Animats 3y agoBut not actual RADAR maps, with weather and aircraft returns.
- nickpatrick 3y agoStay tuned...!?
- KeplerBoy 3y agoor SAR imaging, because that would be cool.
- Ayesh 3y agoGeocoding is certainly _much_ cheaper than other providers.
- nunodonato 3y agoas cheap as ArcGIS, which is vastly superior. But kudos to this project
- nickpatrick 3y agoOut of curiosity, why do you think it's vastly superior?
- Vanit 3y agoWhat's the policy for attribution and saving copies of annotated maps for distribution?
- nickpatrick 3y agoCan you share more about what you're hoping to do?
- Vanit 3y agoI used to work for a company that made an app for drafting evacuation signs, and we had a usecase for using a map as an underlay to show the surrounding buildings/terrain for the siteplan. I recall that quite a few map providers had a TOS that prevented that usecase (as the evac signs would be saved to pdf for distribution or printed), so I'm interested what the take is here.
- leonardo2204 3y agoNot sure if I missed it, but how do you calculate address completion request? I mean, Google let me pass a random key for every Word I type and charge me once. Do you have something similar? Or each letter counts as 1 request? Thanks for this great Project!
- nickpatrick 3y agoPricing is per API call right now, but we're planning to add "per session" pricing in future.
- erhaetherth 3y agoYou had me until this pricing page: https://radar.com/pricing?type=consumer https://radar.com/pricing?type=consumer I'm interested in the address autocompletion in particular, but you guys don't want to tell me how much it's actually going to cost apparently. I also have no idea what a "monthly tracked user" is or how it's relevant. LMK when you drop the "Contact Sales" aspect.
- nickpatrick 3y agoPricing page could def be clearer. Working on it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37668919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37668919
- JamesBrooks 3y agoI came to write exactly this comment, specifically I wanted to check what the pricing for forward geocoding was, as I've got a very significant monthly Google Maps bill for geocoding and if Radar gives results which are 95% as good as Google's at a cheaper price then I'd be jumping
- freyfogle 3y agoHi, there are much more affordable geocoding options: https://opencagedata.com https://opencagedata.com
- nunodonato 3y agowhy do so many people rely on Google for this? ArcGIS is vastly superior and much cheaper.
- Helmut10001 3y agoESRI is as evil as Google (if not worse). If pricing is the only consideration, maybe ESRI is the way to go, but I would take other aspects into account, too (e.g. walled-garden signals, tricking customers, software-lock-in).
- nickpatrick 3y ago
- johncalvinyoung 3y agoWhat's the terms on your forward geocoding? Many providers have terms that require live lookup of address->latlong, no caching permitted. My client's use case has long-lived addresses that may need to be mapped many times, and currently we're paying for one of the only geocoding services that permits us to persist the coordinates involved.
- nickpatrick 3y agoOur standard policy is that you can cache responses for up to 30 days: https://radar.com/documentation/maps/geocoding#caching https://radar.com/documentation/maps/geocoding#caching
- amluto 3y ago> Licensee shall not … store any address or point of interest data from Radar's geocoding, autocomplete, or place search APIs for more than thirty (30) days; So if an e-commerce site user starts typing their address, it’s autocompleted via Radar, and the user confirms it, then the site must delete the user’s address after 30 days? This seems wrong.
- flir 3y ago*crickets*
- johncalvinyoung 3y agoThanks for the reply. I was reading docs but missed that somehow.
- warpspin 3y ago> and currently we're paying for one of the only geocoding services that permits us to persist the coordinates involved. I'll ask blatantly: Which one is that?
- freyfogle 3y ago
- webappguy 3y agoCheck out HERE for great pricing
- KronisLV 3y agoI was actually looking into options for maps, geocoding and routing for a freelance thing that I'm doing and this actually seems great! I might go with Mapbox for the already started project, but will probably use Radar for at least something in the future. The other options I considered were Mapbox and MapTiler, since it seems that actually self-hosting everything yourself is a bit demanding on hardware resources. I mean, I love that you can get the OSM dataset into PostGIS pretty easily, but getting the vector data or raster tiles to the client can take a bit of CPU power and bunches of storage! I wonder whether I missed any other good cloud services, or a self-hosted stack that would make things easier. That said, I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data. I guess you can cache both and vector data is actually less storage intensive, but at the same time pretty much every vector map implementation lags badly on my phone and sometimes even a bit on my netbook (Radar still lags for me, although less than Mapbox, probably because Mapbox does the whole fancy 3D globe thing with fog and stuff). Either way, major props for making this exist and pricing it so competitively! Would be cool to also fix the attribution text that's on the lower right on desktop but doesn't show up on mobile, at least for me.
- eliaspro 3y agoYou might also want to check out https://felt.com/ https://felt.com/ (also OSM-based).
- nickpatrick 3y agoWe are big fans of Felt!
- karussell 3y agoFor a self-hosted vector tile stack you can have a look into https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler I found it very easy to get started and when you know the other stacks it is also very fast to create these vector tiles even for planet-scale. (note, that I'm not affiliated with them, but they use some source code from us for the efficient import and also contributed to GraphHopper, but this did not influence my experience ;) ) > I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data. The flexibility of styling. And you can easily serve customers that need different default languages. This makes maps also more accessible for countries without Latin alphabet. Also when you rotate the map (like for GPS navigation) the labels can rotate too if necessary.
- ale42 3y agoAm I the only one who thought it was some aggregator for weather radar data?
- edrxty 3y agoWas hoping for some sort of interesting synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping service like Capella Space. Instead got more adtech APIs :/ Why did they name themselves "Radar"?
- nickpatrick 3y agoAs someone who used to work at an ad tech company, I can tell you that we're very much not an ad tech company. In fact, we set out to build the opposite. More here: https://radar.com/blog/our-commitment-to-privacy https://radar.com/blog/our-commitment-to-privacy Short, easy-to-spell name that suggests location. It's worked out pretty well for us, and we got the dot com!
- HumblyTossed 3y ago> name that suggests location. Not really.
- pookha 3y agoYou might want to take a look at this: https://github.com/ngageoint/sarpy https://github.com/ngageoint/sarpy