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Comment by cpt_snowcrash | Hacker News Reader

Pricing looks way too expensive to me even for small to medium scale usage. And if my business cross the medium scale , then why wouldn't i really build it inhouse. Seem like a classic case of product looking for problem.

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Its 4 cents per action. An action here is one trip which would involve multiple updates. Doesn't seem that expensive.

The question is why should I even pay you $1 cent for a service for which existing underlying APIs are already extremely good( android or iOS location API and Google Maps API )

Right. I use doordash all the time, and pay $5 - $10 for delivery. It gives me occasional status updates on my delivery, but no real time tracking. I'd love to see this in doordash, and if it costs them $0.04 from the $5 fee it seems like a no brainer. Same for so many other similar services.

IIRC, doordash used to provide a live map a couple years back. I'm guessing they have all the data and could share it again if they desired. Presumably they have some product reason for not offering it.

They still do around here (Boston, MA).

We have several large scale businesses that are paid customers and find it cheaper to use us, than build it in-house. It's about the cost of an engineer, and that's a fraction of what they will incur, ongoing operating costs notwithstanding

Still too expensive. Instead of biasing your user studies with big companies that already use your product, you should listen to the greater population of potential users. But hey, that's startup 101 and I don't expect you to know that.

Businesses for whom location tracking is critical process component and not a good to have such as logistic companies or lets say food/medicine delivery companies who also already have an app deployed with their end agents, the additional cost for them to get location tracking and reporting integrated in their mobile apps is trivial and also there is no technical moat as is there in lets say messaging or SMS APIs ( like Twilio). Either I don't understand your customer set, or problem you are solving is simply not big enough. You are trying to do to location tracking what twilio did to messaging, but reality is location tracking as a service doesn't make a very solid business case here. But best of luck :)

We've been amazed at how developers across logistics and delivery companies, messaging products, SaaS platforms, and marketplaces have used our SDKs and APIs to build live location features in their apps, and we're very excited to enable all of them. Thanks for your wishes!

"... the additional cost for them to get location tracking and reporting integrated in their mobile apps is trivial..."

As a professional developer I would say that its not trivial, at least not cheap to develop. Theoretically all problems you know how to solve are trivial. Professionally you know that developing a solution that is flexible, reliable, supportable, extendible, user friendly and maintainable takes time, expertise and money to develop.

It'd be easy to say that about an SMS API too though, no?

To what extent do you promise your customers that their clients' data will be both well secured and remain private?

Providing a middleman with this kind of information is a little too much trust for me to think in terms of cents per action.

Spying-as-a-Service, haha!

Interesting I developed very similar application please take a look at this app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spacetime

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