Hacker News Reader

Comment by dumbfounder | Hacker News Reader

Wow, 10x price increase or more for just about everything.

Kind of hard to compare apples to apples, there was a pretty steep minimum on previous contracts, I'd imagine that high volume users could negotiate volume discounts beyond those listed.

At least this way there's not a huge cliff between the free product and a contract for larger volumes.

I did some comparisons with the old pricing as well. For geocoding it seems the free tier got halved (assuming average usage over a month) while the paid tier got x8 more expensive.

(disclaimer: In case of geocoding Google is a competitor, we run https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/)

It would be nice if this leads to more interest in alternatives (OSM based systems including maplet).

Previously, when google made the initial shift in this direction a few years ago, it seemed like there was a brief period when more people were considering alternatives, but since most people were able to continue using the free tier this tapered off pretty quickly.

> OSM based systems including maplet

You mean leaflet.js?

Leaflet is a nice javascript library for slippy maps, but you still need to bring your own tileserver (OSM is not free to embed for anything beyond light usage I believe)

Yeah, I just had never heard of maplet, so I was unsure if that s/he really meant leaflet or maplet.

Oops. In the process of trying to decide whether to write leaflet or mapbox I confused the names.

I kind of love it :)

Note - I work at Mapbox

Previously, there were 25000 daily free map loads, now 28000 monthly? I have 10K loads daily...

Are all those loads needed? In other words, how often do people interact with them? (Figuring how often they look at them is even more effort.) This kind of changes usually are made to discourage inefficient use of the API, which could be delayed until specific events happen: scrolling, mouseover, timer, etc. I'm not saying that's necessarily your case.

I can probably lower the loads somewhat, but I use other maps services too (street view, etc.) and this $200 free credit seems like for all of the services combined monthly, so one does not get a $200 free credit for each service and costs will quickly add up.

Makes sense.

I see that the limit you mention is for dynamic maps. Somewhere else, they say "Requests for Dynamic Maps and Dynamic Street View (Street View Panoramas) will be billed at a higher rate than requests for Static Maps and Static Street View. Dynamic Maps and Street View images respond to user input; the Static versions do not."

I imagine that this is an incentive for developers to use static maps (which you could replace with dynamic ones when the user clicks or hovers on them). If you used static maps alone, that's 300K loads per month, or $480. You would deduct the $200 credit, for a $280 bill, but then pay full price for all the other services. I can see how that adds up quickly...

you got 30 days. hope you got nothing else planned... ruins my current roadmap.

It's almost like Google Maps got bought by Oracle, but virtually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com