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Comment by TotempaaltJ | Hacker News Reader

The real meat of this story:

> A web application with 50,000 map loads using the Google Maps API will cost $350 per month.

> A similar amount of traffic running through a Protomaps CDN install on Cloudflare, with an average of 20 tiles per session, costs fifty cents in Cloudflare Workers request fees.

$350 versus $0.50! Who's going to be the first to build a (maybe Google Maps-compatible?) API on top of this and sell it for a fraction of the cost?

Edit: Looked around a bit and Protomaps already offers a hosted map through Github Sponsors here: https://github.com/sponsors/protomaps

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As mentioned in the post there's a _free_ API for non-commercial use that I maintain, and you can make commercial use of it by becoming a GitHub Sponsor:

http://github.com/sponsors/protomaps

But being "Google Maps compatible" will never be possible as long as the Google Maps client library and data are proprietary.

That's awesome, just saw that myself! This is a super cool project.

Fwiw with "Google Maps compatible" I didn't mean showing Google's Maps, I was thinking more a drop-in replacement to (some subset of) Google's client library.

Hmm, I haven't heard of any open source projects re-implementing Google's client library, and I imagine it would be difficult to keep parity with a closed-source project.

Most open source efforts have consolidated around MapLibre GL https://maplibre.org which is a maintained fork of Mapbox GL before their switch to a source-available license.

Most Google Maps client library users use only a few basic features - "display slippy map here with a pin centered on here" type thing.

Then just stub out any other API call with "alert('Not implemented, but PR's welcome!')"

And as far as webmasters are concerned, switching from google maps to your maps involves just switching out the <script> tag for a different one.

An API is an API. The code behind it being closed is irrelevant.

> $350 versus $0.50!

It's not as impressive as you make it sound. The real value of the Maps API is in 1) routing and 2) local business details. These are both hard for anybody else to provide, so Google prices them accordingly. The price for the tiles is just an extension to the overall pricing.

There are lots of usecases for apps that don't need these advanced features, and just want a nice backdrop for their geo data.

The current offerings of google, mapbox, bing, etc are prohibitively expensive when you just need a small subset of their features.

The company I work for is a happy customer of maptiler.com which even offers routing and reverse geocoding. It might not be as great and up to date as google's, but it's more than enough for our apps.

In this case you should just use Leaflet and OpenStreetMap for a grand total of $0 per month.

OpenStreetMap tile servers aren't really meant to be used for this. They do allow some use, but are also subject to throttling if your application puts too much load on their servers.

> However, OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.

https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/

Just so you know, I make it a point to report to OSM maintainers any relatively sizeable app using their tile servers, just so they can be banned.

The default OSM tile server is not here to serve your startup.

That is usually out of the question, because raster tiles don't allow you to customize the map (colors, which features to display at which zoom levels, etc). I find openstreetmap way too busy as a backdrop for data.

As I've said, the solutions are there, and there is an actual demand for cheap vector tile hosting without all of the other cruft that is bundled in the commercial solutions but isn't actually needed.

> I find openstreetmap way too busy as a backdrop for data.

Fortunately there’s a large selection of background layers for leaflet: http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/ I quite like CartoDB Positron for as a muted background.

Thanks, but I'm really happy with our vector tileset solution, and don't want to downgrade to raster tiles. They are pretty slow compared to vector tiles with mapbox/maplibre gl.

Additionally, embedding maps in websites, the thing that most small businesses are wanting to do, is free. The pricing looks to me like it's centered around features that companies might be integrating into their products in order to monetise, which seems fair.

Only for a static image of a map. The "slippy" map that supports zooming and panning isn't free.

It is more or less free. It's known as the Maps Embed API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/get-s...

    > All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.

I used it for my app (https://turas.app) and it is very, very capable for a free product (cross my fingers that they don't jack it up like they did Maps API proper).

Actually as far as I can tell it's the other way around: if you embed the JS map it's free, but static tiles are charged API requests. I suspect this is because the JS map allows Google to create onwards journeys into Google Maps, and has limited utility outside embedding maps, whereas the static map tiles could be used in all sorts of products. I could be wrong though.

Ah yeah, I think you're right. I may have been looking at old documentation on pricing.

> local business details

That situation is actually kind of outrageous. Municipalities and governmental bodies feed data into Google rather than publicly-accessible platforms (like OSM). And so do the private businesses, with no regulatory mechanism forcing either them to submit the same data to local / public databases (like yellow pages, national map site / registries, or OSM) or forcing Google to provide dumps of its data for the public to use.

I hate having to access Google to find information which is simply not available in map for, or at all, elsewhere.

Yeah I agree. As near as I can tell municipalities treat Alphabet like their own data utility. They consider it an extension of their government. I have two kids in public school and those schools' reliance on these closed platforms is almost 100% complete for everything from newsletters to surveys to class sign-up and bill payment. It is the largest thing that keeps me from de-googling my life.

I'm not necessarily saying municipalities should build this stuff out themselves, only that it freaks me out when small governments rely on giant corporations to support their infrastructure.

> These are both hard for anybody else to provide, so Google prices them accordingly.

I used to provide data to Google, mark missing postboxes, etc. Then I realised I am just helping them make money.

Also they used to be quick, and got sloppy - 7 years ago my submission would get processed in 1 week. Recently i submitted nearby postbox, with GPS coordinates and pictures - 6 months, no responce.

This is lile with social networks - the content is what matters, and people give it away for free

Better spend that time on Open Street Map then.

I would argue its easier and quite fun to do via StreetComplete:

https://streetcomplete.app/

(Mobile app where you can fix and enhance OpenStreetMap data on the go.)

Local business details also can be the opposite of what you want: You don't want your competitors on the map.

Not sure if there are ready use alternatives, but at least in theory with OSM you could fully control what is being shown. And what not.

I will say I'm for this setup, but what you're saying is not exactly true. You can customize what is shown with the styling wizard, and completely remove types of markers from maps you create. https://mapstyle.withgoogle.com/

Exactly this.

Google Maps isn’t charging for raw bandwidth/storage. They spend massive amounts on R&D to make Maps the most useful and competitive global mapping solution. This comes at a cost, which is completely different than using community-maintained partially-complete OSM maps.

A little naughty to describe OSM as "partially complete" but not Google. Last time I looked, Google didn't have a fraction of the footpaths or cycleways around here that OSM has.

>The real value of the Maps API is in 1) routing and 2) local business details.

Google is crowdsourcing both

They could have it initially run a Google api search and cache that kind of local data for when the next person runs it

I don't know about "20 tiles per session"

That's like, 1 pan or 1 zoom. It might as well be a static map if the users don't actually interact with it.

I would be that's actually a majority of usage in the wild. Sometimes I'll zoom out if I need more context, but I'm not wandering around most embedded gmaps.

My point was if that's truly the dominant use case then the map should be a static image initially and replaced with tiles lazily.

It is the dominant use case, and a static server-rendered image is more computationally expensive to generate than a tile-based system; a static image has effectively infinite variation in center, bounds and map scale, so requires dynamic computation from a server to send a JPEG/PNG. A tile-based system can just pre-generate a couple million tiles which is exactly the strategy Protomaps uses.

> Tested in production at scale: On AWS, response times average 100 ms for cache hits, 200 ms for misses. Cloudflare is significantly slower, but is improving as Cloudflare's R2 offering matures.

They are comparing the price using Cloudflare, which although cheap, has poor performance.

I don't know anything about these services or their pricing. Maybe AWS costs about the same as Cloudflare, but it's cheeky to have inconsistent comparisons like this. Ideally, this post/advert would provide the equivalent AWS price also (or provide Cloudflare performance numbers).

Author here. AWS is quite a bit more expensive than cloudflare, mostly because of egress charges from Cloudfront.

Cloudflare R2 latency is tricky to predict and can be anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds to 1s+ in my experience. This is for cache misses, only, of course; cache hits are comparable to AWS. Cloudflare really has every incentive to improve their product so I expect this to be much more competitive in the near future.

I haven’t really seen many R2 performance benchmarks, but 1s+ for retrieval is nuts. Is that time to first byte or total time? On what average object size?

It claims that it's self hostable, maybe it's because I'm on the phone right now, but I couldn't find any self hosting instructions.

The thing being discussed is designed for cloud, so I think self managed is a better description?

https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn

Self hosting pmtiles is straightforward also, make a file available to a server that supports range requests:

https://protomaps.com/docs/pmtiles#2.-serve-your-file-locall...

TCO = Total Cost of Ownership.

The cost will likely be in developmetn and maintanance, not service fees.

Use whichever API is clean, simple, stable and you don't have to think about.

This might be a solution for larger operations that have some intrinsic relationships with maps.

> Who's going to be the first to build a (maybe Google Maps-compatible?) API

There would be some irony if a 3rd-party monetize off of Google shoulders a compatible-API to their Map service.

Given that's what they did to Java.

Embrace and extend :)

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