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One place I worked had been using a Google Map, but switched to Bing when the price went up. The Bing map had a banner on it saying they needed a license key, so they just hid the banner with CSS! I came in a few years later and replaced the whole thing with Leaflet+Carto, but it was pretty funny code archeology to see "Hmm, why is this crazy CSS class here. Oh…"

Which is funny because it seems misaligned with Google’s business model. Shouldn’t they be the cheapest option, and generating revenue by ad placements in 3rd party apps?

I suppose the ad value of static images in tiles is low, and there’s no way to ensure that developers honor JavaScript or other interactivity for ads?

I mean when it comes to interactive maps you have to load their JS to display them. Unlike OSM you don't have (legit) access to the raw tiles. You would think that base maps would be a loss-leader for them but with it's current pricing that doesn't seem to be the case. Places API or Directions API are even more crazy in pricing that I never even consider using them. I'd love to give exact driving/walking distances but the cost to do so would be astronomical, instead I just use the haversine formula to give "as the crow flies" distances.

I would love to see some of the more complicated Google Maps APIs unseated by 3rd party providers (Places/Distance, I guess Solar/Pollen/etc too but I care less about those).

> Unlike OSM you don't have (legit) access to the raw tiles

Google does serve raw tiles, not free of course

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/maps-static...

That’s not really “raw tiles” in the OSM or other 3rd party map provider sense. Especially since you can’t save/cache them really (and you can’t use them with something like leaflet legally)

Save them to the blockchain then, they can't do anything about it.

I once was on a project that started out with OSM, but then realised there was nothing that compared to Google's Places API (might be different now) in terms of completeness and correctness. And your are not (or at least were not) allowed to use Places API on top of / in combination with OSM).

That's what you get when your consumer directed products are 'free' and thus widely used and thus lot's of stake holders ensure their place is correctly in their database (probably in combination with other, possibly community based, efforts).

We relied heavily on Places API and thus were bound to Google Maps API, we did just not see a reasonable way around that.

> That's what you get when your consumer directed products are 'free' and thus widely used and thus lot's of stake holders ensure their place is correctly in their database (probably in combination with other, possibly community based, efforts)

Would it be crazy yo have the government maintain such a database and make it available to anyone? It seems like the ideal place to join forces and avoid data duplication.

Think about your interactions with the government, e.g. getting a drivers license, passport, filing taxes, parking tickets, etc.

Do you want those people managing something like maps or places on maps?

In the UK the government sort of does manage a map that’s used as the basis of a lot of others maps called Ordinance Survey Maps.

>Do you want those people managing something like maps or places on maps

Yes. The USPS is actually pretty good at it too. They even have their own API you can use.

>Think about your interactions with the government

My public roads, building codes, food safety, food affordability, stable power grids, advanced medical care, space exploration.

The government is plenty capable of doing good things, however people letting carefully crafted legislation, get passed or even created, that supports private interests is a societal illness, not a fundamental issue with government capabilities.

> The USPS is actually pretty good at it too.

In my opinion, the USPS is mostly an advertisement delivery system, and every once in a while they deliver a very important letter from the IRS so that you have to look through all of it.

I don’t know how we tolerate this federal system that is literally 80% spam advertisements

NASA, NOAA etc. do weather, accuWeather and others use federal weather data as the underlying source (and lobby and even install themselves in power to try and keep the government side less user friendly).

Using an example from another country, NZ's LINZ also has some great data: https://www.linz.govt.nz/products-services/data/types-linz-d...

Think about your interactions with Google, and the question becomes less clear.

Those services work very well in many countries. In the United States we have one party that likes to show government doesn't work by crippling, defunding, and generally making government programs worse when they get power so that you pay private companies for those save services. Often times companies they have a connection with.

Yes, all digital interactions I have with the government, like renewing my license or paying a parking ticket, are generally very quick and easy. Filling out my taxes is not particularly fun, but that isn't the IRS IT department's fault, and the actual act of submitting them online is again very quick and easy. I have also had very good experiences with government public datasets (examples at https://catalog.data.gov/dataset).

At my job I use APIs from the EPA and EIA, and they are stable, well-documented, and generally pleasant to use. I can also email an actual human with questions and get quick responses, which I can't do with Google. I have no concerns about the APIs ever disappearing because the PM got bored or wanted a promotion, or because they couldn't extract enough money from users.

I think whoever manages these services would do an excellent job running a mapping service or Places API, although obviously it would be hard to get traction now that Google Maps is so established.

Some of the features that make Google Maps useful, like GPS and public transit arrival times, are already based on government services.

I have indeed paid my federal, state, and local taxes online, and it was not too terrible.

On the other hand, the USPTO patent database is nearly impossible for anyone other than a professional to navigate. Their search sucks.

Since you mentioned taxes: the fact that Intuit and H&R Block have successfully prevented the IRS from doing what nearly everyone wants: file your taxes for you, for free. For the vast majority of taxpayers, they could do that, yet the political pressure from paid tax preparers have prevented it, at least up to now.

And this illustrates the flaw with your starry-eyed Pollyanna-ism: no matter how honest & hard-working the bureaucrats might be, they're still accountable to corrupt pressures.

The 1950 census data, recently released, also sucks. To find one family whose exact address I wasn't sure of, I had to manually open about 50 strips of census taker daily records and decipher the hand-written names & addresses. Merely finding these 50 strips took more effort than nearly anyone would exert.

Their Search failed to find the family. I don't anyone could figure this out unless they were extremely motivated.

And last but certainly not least, let's look at the Obamacare website rollout, which got a Cabinet secretary fired.

So don't give us a couple good anecdotes and say, "look, the government works great!"

Well we were looking world wide so that would be a lot of governments. Having said that, here in the Netherlands I could see it happen, the gouvernement does have (had) quite a few open data initiatives.

In the UK, ordnance survey does this. It's better than osm for most things, and worse for others

In Australia, I believe Australia Post has an address API but I don't think it's free.

Google must diversify its source of revenue, that's the purpose of hardware, Cloud, Youtube premium and others. It is also why they sell access to APIs.

> generating revenue by ad placements in 3rd party apps

What worked for websites doesn't work for apps. Have you seen apps with ads built into them? They look horrendous. I usually uninstall them within 5 seconds of seeing them.

I think the OP is talking about ads in the sense of showing certain places more prominently, not banner ads.

It's hard to ensure, and if a developer wants to, they can show ads themselves.

When I worked in a startup with location-based apps we also were hit by that Google Maps API price increase. However, my understanding is that they are still free for use on mobile, and maybe that's the place which Google really cares to be at any cost? As for the web, they already control all the data they want with their to analytics, ads, and Chrome browser.

Have you heard about https://www.felt.com or https://umap.openstreetmap.fr ? Both run on OSM and are free

It used to be cheap and affordable, then one day some Google executive decided to 10X the Map APIs pricing.

I mean this one I actually get. The price under the hood must be immeasurable. They run street cars, buy satellite data, have developers, qa, support. All for a product used by most for free.

I mean the charging a price for it yes, but expecting everyone to be able to pay it is a fantasy.

but they also run a first-party maps app. the price of the streetview cars, satellite data, development, and qa isn't all just for the API.

i'm not really criticizing, they can charge whatever they want if they don't want people to use their maps api. and i suspect they don't really want people to use their maps API - the pricing seems targeted to milk the orgs who can't be bothered to implement a cheaper option.

Does anyone else have a solution for the satellite layer? I was using MapLibre [0] then needed direct-on-the-ground images which made me convert to Google Maps.

[0] https://maplibre.org/

For a potential USA-only solution, (I don't know if it will fit or be usable for your use case) the USDA provides aerial imagery under the "National Agricultural Imagery Program." [1]

[1]: https://www.fsa.usda.gov/Assets/USDA-FSA-Public/usdafiles/AP...

If you're willing to pay for it, a company I worked for switched from Google Maps to TomTom maps, and TomTom does offer aerial image maps. I don't remember the specifics of exactly how much cheaper TomTom was vs Google Maps, but I remember it being on the order of an 80% discount.