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Comment by kinard | Hacker News Reader

WOW, my costs are going to go from about $320 per month to $3,750 per month.

Time to find a different solution! GULP!

Hey kinard,

I'm an ex-Mapzen teammember, and we've set up a new, paid, geocoding service called https://geocode.earth. I suspect we can give you what you need around geocoding, especially autocomplete, for much less than Google. Feel free to request an invite or reach out to me personally.

and you have 30 days to somehow make it work or switch. for an API service that's seems pretty irresponsible to it's users. You would think they'd give you a few months notice at minimum.

I'm using Mapbox - much nicer and much cheaper - check them out.

I was trying to set up my first gmaps project a couple of weeks ago using node and ran into a bunch of issues that were hard to resolve due to lack up updated documentation. Switched over to mapbox and got everything working in like 5 min or so. +1

I have to say their mapbox-gl-js lib is really slick. Easy to setup and configure.

Thanks, I'll take a look!

Is there a places type autocomplete equivilent for mapbox? I can't see anything in their services list

Check out https://www.mapbox.com/api-documentation/#geocoding

Note - I work at Mapbox

This won't happen unless you have a huge traffic which usually should translate to revenues that can support it. There is nothing wrong with services that you use to generate profits but have to pay for. Services like maps with 99% coverage of the world takes enormous amount of efforts over many years of sweat by very talented team. I know of countries where government wasn't able to produce good maps for decades but Google was. Currently while I travel, I very heavily rely on Google Maps. It's a pretty amazing service and I have paid more for stupid Angry Bird.

100 users hitting 10 pages a day = 1000 map loads a day. 1000 map loads a day * 30 days = 30000 map loads which is over the "free" amount. This assumes NO api calls at all, only map loads.

This change will affect all apps that have any sort of actual user base. I think you may be underestimating the how quickly you can go through API calls even without many users.

While I understand they want to make money, giving developers 30 days to now pay 40x what they paid before is ridiculous.

> This won't happen unless you have a huge traffic which usually should translate to revenues that can support it.

For a B2B product where every user/visitor pays a high fee, sure. However, for a consumer website that is either ad-supported, or where a small percentage of visitors pays a low fee, this is definitely not true. The new pricing is insanely expensive.

That is a huge increase. What services were you using?

Maps, Places and Geocoding

I'm just starting a side project that uses similar, i think it's the pricing around autocomplete and places information that seems like the most painful part to me.

Currently I'm using it to search and add points on a map, it seems like it could really add up

There are a few free alternatives to Google:

arcgis has a free place suggestions API: https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/geocode/api-reference/geo...

OpenCageData is pretty good for geocoding with a good free tier.

My company https://stadiamaps.com does map tiles at very generous tiers.

Thanks for the suggestions! Will definitely have a look

Shameless plug: https://stadiamaps.com

We do map tiles and static maps, along with basic routing.

Try $0/month to $20k/month :-/

What services do you use? I'm working on a startup in this space, and I could definitely recommend a set of services that replace Google for much cheaper (even if you didn't use us ;) ).

Primarily just maps; real estate sector. The $20k is a ballpark for one project, another would add another ~$5k a month.

It's a good motivation to improve our usage of their APIs and I'm sure that I can bring down those cost estimates (by reducing API usage overall and by switching some to use the static map API - although the caps on resolution gave us problems with that in the past).

That makes sense; well, if you wish, please reach out to me at luke@stadiamaps.com

We have a lot of customers in real estate, and would love to set you up with something that would be significantly less than $25k. These situations are why we started the company. :)

I think our tiers work very well for the real estate space overall.

I'll have a look, thanks. Your pricing looks much more reasonable - I suspect you're going to be seeing a large spike in demand.

Initial work on reducing load looks very promising though (lazy loading only when users scroll as far as the map on property pages, pooling map instances/dom elements and reusing them across a React app so that they're not recreated) - both things I really should have been doing already anyway. I guess that's part of the motivation for the change - even if I don't pay anything, I'm now costing Google less.

Thanks!

Definitely let us know if we can help in any way. We're more than happy to build out any missing functionality you might need to make a transition.

I'm putting together statements from those affected by the huge price increase to send to the Google Maps product team as a joint message. If you'd like to add yours, please email me at nick@instantstreetview.com

any luck on getting a response?

You could take a look at TallyGo. They have a navigation SDK with reasonable pricing. (Disclaimer: I work there)

TallyGo is $2.50/1000 routes with our mapping provided for free as long as you're using routes. We'd love to have you check it out: https://www.tallygo.com/pricing

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