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Comment by kirchhoff | Hacker News Reader

It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative.

I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month.

Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been reaching out to such entities individually, offering their 'premium plan' service.

The pricing for the (old) premium plan was remarkably similar to the new pricing which now applies to everyone.

This pricing change has ended the era of Google Maps mashups / hobby projects.

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If you read the original article, it gives you the impression that it's tiles only. But as you point out it's a lot of different parts of the Maps service going up by usually an order of magnitude at least.

I run a geocoding service for Australia specifically (https://geocodeplus.com.au) and a lot of people I talk to are completely unaware that they're going to see a x10 change in what their forward/reverse geocoding is going to cost them.

If they were concerned about abuse from free tiers, there's much better ways to handle it than this. It's Google we're talking about.

Also, it's a lame excuse because this affects paid users such as yourself who have nothing to do with the abuse.

In Google's defense, a hobby project wouldn't need 750k requests a month. At that point it's more than a hobby. But, the 28k limit is low.

You're right about the Street View feature that is currently a true key diferenciator that has not a lot of competition in terms of availability and coverage.

Though, Mapillary is quite interesting but their pricing model is not really comparable to Google's one: https://www.mapillary.com/pricing

I think there is a different reason for charging for StreetView. The need to make their money back and quick. Self driving cars will have cameras that will give reasonable results for a lot of use cases (maybe not 360 but who cares). It is also a potential combo monetization strategy for the autonomous vendor.

The standard license prohibits use in autonomous vehicles. Para 2.e https://maps.google.com/help/terms_maps.html

The issue isn't what google allows/prohibits, its that any new autonomous vehicle company could quickly amass a similar data set to street view and nullify googles 10 plus year investment driving non autonomous cars around to capture street view images.

It's not as simple as capturing the imagery. The backend processing for Google maps is astonishing. It will take years to get to the smoothness that is Google Streetview.

I think the comment you replied to was saying that StreetView will soon be commodotized, so they need to make the money back now.

Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won't have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complaining to your regulators as well, especially using Street View as your main complaint since there's no real alternatives.

Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren't very good. There's a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn't want to take.

Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn't as good as the market leader. That's not predatory.

Other companies didn’t want to make that huge investment BECAUSE of Google. Google offered the same service for free, which meant they had no recourse for recouping that investment. Now that has changed, and the lack of standing competitors is a direct result of that history.

Microsoft has made HUGE investments into Bing and yet Google was always superior and Microsoft isn't exactly rolling in money with Bing.

There are several competitors, the issue at hand is they have an inferior product. If your argument held any water, literally everyone would use TMobile because they are so much cheaper. Reality is, a products quality matters and Google Maps were both more cost effective AND a better product.

So you're upset that Google hasn't been charging a lot more all along?

Just because there are competitors in a field does not mean that one company does not hold a monopoly. There were other oil companies in existence when standard oil was broken up.

I never said it did. The argument was that there was no competition. There is competition, it's just weak for some aspects of Google Maps. And the argument here seems to be that Google isn't allowed to start charging for a product because they didn't before, which is silly.

The link to make a complain would be the antitrust division here: https://www.justice.gov/atr/report-violations

>They seemed to buy into my reasoning

We're going to need a bit more detail from an account that clearly has an agenda.

When it comes to Google I just have a lot of issues with the company and didn't have my real login handy when an article about them came up a few days ago. From big issues, like hiring Eric Schmidt and frequent attempts at anti-competitive behavior, to small ones, like prudish censoring of search results and weird customer service (including a six-month delay in getting a response to a simple request for a Maps enterprise quote), I could really just go on and on with the variety of reasons why I don't like Google. I've seen firsthand, at multiple Google locations, an odd attitude that must have permeated from the top. The only people that seemed to be different were a few acquihires who exuded a combination of resignation and pragmatism about their situation.

Edit: If you meant that you wanted more detail about my antitrust complaint, I contacted them via the antitrust email address. They took a while to call back, but not as long as Google took to get me that Maps quote...

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