Hacker News Reader

Non-web person here: No idea that Google Maps costs money for anyone, assumed it was ad-supported like anything else.

Well, in this case it's if you want to use their API to show maps in your application. If you're doing that, you're going to need to pay them in terms of total requests to their backend. Their B2B service and advertising probably funds the normal consumer app (ie just logging onto 'maps.google.com' to find your local coffee shop).

I think they gave us 2 months, which isn't really enough time to adequately look at alternatives given all the other things going on in an organization.

Had we had more time I probably would have looked at doing our own implementation using leaflet and Open Street Map. But that is a pretty big project to throw in when are in the middle of a year long roadmap. I assume this played into Googles strategy. Give them enough of a heads up, but not enough time for most to move away.

You could simply pay them for the little bit of extra time that it would cost you to figure out where you want to move.

It was a thing on here just over a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16980166

I think the service used to only really impact medium-to-big sites, but the price change basically impacts any site. After 25,000 map loads (page hits) you start incurring some substantial fees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com