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Comment by blueski | Hacker News Reader

Our Google Maps bill went from ~$100k per year to $380k per year as a result of these changes. Needless to say, we're moving over to Mapbox.

What Google seems to miss is how this will affect customers' receptiveness to other Google products in the long-term. Having pulled the rug from under us once, there's no way we could consider e.g. a migration to Cloud in case the same happened again (where moving to a different provider would be far more painful).

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I agree. I get that when you build your business around someone else's API that you are responsible for any changes and you should be prepared when business models change, but this would be analogous to milk prices going from $1/pint to $3.80/pint.

A 280% increase in pricing after you've gained dominance in market share is a tough pill to swallow and left a really bad taste in developer's mouths.

I too have moved on to Mapbox, and I suspect the OSM group was thrilled at the changes since now their mapping efforts probably increased tremendously. We're probably going to roll our own map tile servers based on OSM since Mapbox as well is pricey, but not Google Maps pricey.

Mapbox actually fired the majority of the people they were paying to work on OSM a few months ago [1]. I don't really know why, and it seems like a really odd decision (unless maybe they're developing their own non OSM-based map), but if anyone knows why I'd love to find out.

[1] Compare https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Mapbox&diff... to the current list: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapbox#Mapbox_Data_Team

Google seems to launch a product, see if it dominates and then monitorises it or drop it like a stone. But offering a free product, advert free, building up customer base for years and then flipping the switch - has become the norm. What they seem to be gearing towards more and more, is offering customers subscription deals to opt out of adverts etc.

Pretty genius really from a company/marketing perspective and equally an approach that only a company the scale of Google with the pockets, could pull off. They effectively rope in lots of developers, then flip the switch on them, knowing some will jump, but equally most will hang in there for various reasons. They are now looking at tapping into the other end of the pie with customer subscriptions.

The upshot and what you end up paying for is the ability to get real support - least that is the vertues many a Google 1, user are trumpeting.

But the real upshot is moves like this will only fuel development of alternative offerings and more so, boost existing alternative offerings.

As with most things beyond death and taxes, there is some sort of choice. It is surprising how many companies in various forms count on consumers not exercising those choices.

lots of wild assumptions there, and slightly offtopic to the thread you replied to, which was about cloud offerings specifically , where they are already on the traditional google product path, not in this assumed path they might or not use for maps.

There are so many APIs that they've flipped pricing on or flat out cancelled I'm surprised anyone still uses them for absolutely any APIs.

Seriously.

I can't say this strongly enough:

Google APIs and platforms are for building toy weekend projects. DO NOT use them for your business.

I see this as their biggest hurdle when trying to sell GCP.

When Amazon and MSFT have decent products and massive reliability, why even try switching to unreliable Google, irrespective of their technical superiority.

I'm using their search with autocomplete as a convenience feature in our app. My bill will go from $0 to $3,000 per month.

I'd be happy to pay them a reasonable price, but this costs more than our whole infrastructure, so we are moving to a vendor who offers a more realistic pricing for us.

Same thing here - have been using Google's autocomplete for 5 years and now it has become our biggest monthly expense for a niche consumer app. It cut our net profits in half.

Trouble is that there is no other service available with as comprehensive of coverage across the globe and so many languages as Google's, so we're just dealing with the hit.

Why do we need this though? I'm perfectly capable of typing my address, have been doing it for years. Every time I start typing where I live and some box pops up with a Google logo in it, I feel kind of violated.

Meanwhile in Google HQ, someone wins a bet over in which house this cookie deleting nerd using Linux on turns out to live in.

If we can please stop it, or at least opt out ("click here not to share your address details with Google") and turn the input box into a dumb textarea, that'd be great. Should save you money, too.

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