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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

> Before the changes, Owczarek’s startup got 750,000 free map views a month and then was charged 50 cents for every 1,000 views on top of that. Then Google started charging after 30,000 views and the cost was $7 per 1,000 views. His costs jumped from nothing to $5,000 a month.

Ouch. How could that possibly be worth it? Are they just trying to squeeze money out of businesses that are already locked into the Maps API? It seems hard to believe that your average startup that needs a map widget (like, for food or pharmacy delivery) would go with Maps instead of OpenStreetMap at that price level.

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Although I appreciate the effort that has gone into and continues to go into OpenStreetMap the reality is that their data set is still pretty poor in comparison to Google Maps. I would not want to create a delivery business that depended upon it for success.

Just last month I found myself in need of a source of map data for a personal use application and thought of OpenStreetMap which led me to looking up my home address. Unfortunately I couldn't find my address by searching, so I zoomed in on my neighborhood. About 50% of the street names in my neighborhood were incorrect, so I spent time correcting them. The last time I had visited OpenStreetMap was about 4 years prior. On that visit about 1/3rd of the streets in my then neighborhood didn't appear.

Guessing you're American? OSM is very often better than Google in Europe and other parts of the world. It's spottier in the US.

Agreed on that. Although in Canada the OSM data seemed really, really good when it came to national parks and trails. Not so much inside Vancouver. (Still enough for navigation by car and on foot, but finding addresses was a major PITA.)

> the reality is that their data set is still pretty poor in comparison to Google Maps.

That entirely depends on where you are. In the US, there are lots of places where OSM is fully equal to Google Maps. There are other places where it's just downright bad.

If you're in one of the places where OSM maps are good, then they're the way to go. If you're not, and you're not willing to contribute the data required to improve them, then you probably want a different solution.

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