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Comment by l5870uoo9y | Hacker News Reader

As an independent hacker using Google Maps or Mapbox have been out of reach for years given their high cost. Sure you get a free tier but as soon as you spend just a little above that it can quickly cost a small fortune. It is a bit sad for the developer community because there could without a doubt be a lot smaller and innovative projects that utilize maps if the pricing made that possible.

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Could someone please share their MapBox pricing vs usage experience?

I am considering building a map related app on MapBox API.

Alternatively, there's the OSS "OpenLayers": https://openlayers.org/en/latest/examples/

I remember a few years ago when the address autocomplete API went from free to thousands of dollars. That was a surprise bill I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

I remember at a previous job someone cut the cost by only doing look-ups after the first three characters had been typed, and at another job someone getting an unexpected five figure bill (they had some explaining to do).

Esri has a free address auto-complete API, and unlike Google who suggests addresses that aren't legal, USPS deliverable addresses, you nearly always get real, valid addresses from Esri since they are pulling USPS's dataset (who is the only org that is legally required to getsl notified when a city or county renames a road, renumbers a block of buildings, etc).

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