Google maps cut prices by 88% | Hacker News Reader

Google maps cut prices by 88%

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205 pointsnjx92 comments

$0.50 per 1000 maps is way better pricing than $4 per 1000 maps, yet still a lot more expensive than using OpenStreetMap even if you factor in CPU and bandwidth costs to run your own data/tile servers.

Assuming OSM is "good enough" for your usage when compared to Google Maps, I don't think this pricing change really modifies the decision much for a lot of people.

This may slow down the tide of those switching over but I don't think it will reverse or stop it.

Agreed, this is too little too late.

We're about to roll out a major maps-based feature that we've been working frantically on for the last several weeks (a yelp-like discovery system for amateur athletic events). Despite having extensive past development experience with Google Maps, the price forced us to go with an OSM-based system (MapQuest tiles + Leaflet).

The surprise? Leaflet/OSM is actually a lot nicer to develop against than Google Maps. Leaflet is a superior API, and the fact that it's open source means I'm never left wondering "WTF?" when there is some strange drawing glitch. I'm never going back.

There are a handful of features that Google Maps provides that OSM does not, and the quality of the Google geocoder is slightly superior. But for drawing a map and icons/polygons, scrolling to determine search bounds, etc, OSM is a superior solution. I would never have discovered this without getting "pushed out of the nest" by price.

One catch: To do HTTPS, we have to proxy the tiles. No big deal.

...and now it's deployed. You can see it here:

https://www.voo.st/

"You don't have JavaScript enabled. Good luck with that.

You're probably also running a painfully old web browser. It hurts us to see you suffer so."

You might want to tone that down a notch. I'm running Opera v12, but just keep JS off by default, white-listing sites as necessary.

Oops! This is one of those things that was supposed to be rewritten but never did. I guess the lesson is to be more careful about leaving snarky comments in public-facing copy... you might forget to change it.

Thanks for the reminder, this will be fixed this afternoon :)

Wow, that arrogant page regarding for users with no Javascript is... wow.

I browse with NoScript enabled by default, I don't need some site thinking it knows better than me and being patronising.

Might want to change some language use there.

Nice. However, too bad that on scrolling you set a "position:fixed;" style on the map/calender part. On my netbook screen, I can only see the first row of days on the calender, and because of position:fixed, I can't scroll down to see the rest.

(http://imgur.com/DSFGE)

I'm on a MacBookPro. I cannot scroll anymore. The [Add Event] button is obscured. The calendar is doing weird things with the menu - why doesn't voost go over it like the rest?

Thanks - this (and the iphone issues) should be fixed now.

Just wanted to mention that your site rocks, I really look forward to using it to discover athletic events around where I live!

Why wheel-to-zoom isn't working? I see this problem on many sites recently, and find it really annoying.

The problem with wheel-to-zoom is that it breaks the mac touchpad experience (and presumably other trackpads that support gestures). When you use two-finger scrolling, you move the page down until the mouse cursor happens to run over a map section, then the page stops scrolling and you start zooming. It's really annoying.

We explicitly turn off wheel-to-zoom. I suspect most sites do it for the same reason.

Most of our "real" users will probably pick a reasonable boundary around their home and leave it there for their lifetime, so disabling the wheel is probably the right decision for us. If our users did a lot of zoom navigation, we'd probably go the other way.

FYI, that page has bizarre scrolling behavior on an iPhone - in case that matters to you.

Unfortunately mobile devices handle the transition of the map element from position:static to position:fixed poorly. It's something we still have to figure out. Thanks for the heads up though!

Are you looking a IP addresses to get initial map coordinates? Curious.

Yes, using the free MaxMind database. We would rather use the geo data appengine provides but our SSL is proxied by CloudFlare and GAE doesn't recognize the forwarding headers yet.

> this is too little too late.

Think so? I would be surprised if Google, so full of smart people and with enough marketing skills that they took over digital advertizing, really were so inept at negotiation.

It doesn't seem a coincidence to me, that this price change comes not even 2 weeks after their major competitor in the mobile market has committed to a different maps platform.

Too late for people who don't need cheap access to billions of dollars worth of high resolution satellite imagery.

And of course, I guess most of the ones that went to OSM after google started charging aren't gonna say "oh well now it's cheap let's go back""

Google seem to have a special talent in alienating their customers

Google Maps almost without exception kicks ass of all other mapping solutions almost throughout Asia - this includes Bing, OSM, Nokia and Blackberry maps. Even in a handful of countries where other maps are good, Google Maps still beats them with their local business information.

OpenStreetMap has superior information for my city (Montevideo, Uruguay), especially housing numbers.

Though for businesses and such, Google Maps is better (and I like the maps and the way they render, too).

This thread makes me want to resurrect one of my side projects (mapping apartments for rent and for sale, the Craigslist equivalent here is lacking on several points, although it is better than Craigslist).

Edit: as it says here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151512

OSM has worse data in some places, and better in others.

I don't know why this has been downvoted but it's true in many parts of India. Don't know about other Asian countries.

Yup, Taiwan as well. I contribute to OSM, but still got to say, it is utterly useless over here, while Google Maps have pretty much everything plus local quirks covered.

OSM will eventually become the standard and Google has, somewhat, contributed to that.

Google may have messed up, initially, but the future of mapping solutions never belonged to anyone.

I think OSM will gain even more momentum as new open source tools to trace arieal satellite imagery before more abundant. IMHO, the future belongs to a curated crowd source content.

Maybe it's just early days, but most of the time when I've tried OSM the sought address was shown in the wrong location, sometimes by blocks.

Yeah, that's true. There are still gaps in the set, but it has come a long way in the last few years.

True but I think this price change is purely to stop people who are considering moving (because of high prices) from doing so.

Wonder if you still have to pay $10K a year just to get SSL. This is one of the biggest reasons, ok, the only reason we've used Bing or OSM for many of our clients.

SSL is available in the free API. Just load the API from here:

    https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/js?sensor=false

(set sensor to true if you're using any kind of geolocation)

Thanks! This must have been a development within the last year or so.

It was added in March 2011 :) http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2011/03/maps-apis-ov...

I was curious about that, too, because it's the same reason we use Bing instead of Google Maps. Their FAQ made it sound like it's free, but I didn't do any serious investigating yet.

"Closing the barn door after the horse is gone" is the first thing that popped into my mind when I read this headline.

The second thing was that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" when they raised prices in the first place (last October, I guess it was). So they got like six months of revenue bump, pissed a lot of people off and created an opportunity for at least one big and viable competitor. Smart.

And now they flip flop.

The message is that if they think they can bend you over a barrel and have their way, they will. And then, if the competitive landscape changes, giving you a chance to get their dick out of your *ss, they will try to kiss and makeup (until they sense their next opportunity to bend you over). What did idiot Bush say? "Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice..." http://youtu.be/eKgPY1adc0A

Google has lost lots of credibility among 3rd party developers using their API and services with the dramatic price hike with Google Maps and AppEngine. You would never know when they will decide to jack up the price again.

Exactly what I was thinking. First reaction from me was that they will raise the price again when they gain market share, second reaction was a quiet note to myself that if they ever drop price on AppEngine like they did to GMap I shall not go back since my startup was hurt so bad with their vendor lock-in and dramatic price raise.

It's pretty shady how Google muscled out the competition by offering Google Maps for free after the acquisition of Keyhole. They basically murdered MapQuest and other "overpriced" solutions only to raise their price to even higher levels once they had a near monopoly on the embedded maps market. Clever, but dirty. Certainly this could be considered "evil".

Wow. The parties that will ultimately suffer most from this are Navteq and TomTom, which now charge between one and two orders of magnitude more than Google for map data.

For car makers seeking to add built-in navigation to their vehicles, Google Maps is now a much more compelling choice than either of those two companies' offerings.

(FWIW, TomTom is reportedly Apple's supplier of map data.)

They aren't doing this because they want to hurt TomTom & Navteq. They are doing this because they are suffering from OpenStreetMap, who charges many orders of magnitude less than Google Maps even with this price drop.

The problem with open street maps is that it so much worse than google maps. Orders of magnitude worse. I love the concept and in theory that concept is unbeatable (who else but those living in the area have the most intricate knowledge of roads, paths, etc?). But as of now, it is simply not comparable. Many features missing, and the data is very incomplete (many streets missing, missing buildings and street numbers, parks, POIs, ...).

In some areas. In some areas OSM is way better than Google Maps.

Google Maps is relatively consistent level of quality across a country (some countries are much better mapped than others in GM), whereas in OSM one part of a city might be well mapped, and another part poorly mapped.

OSM better than GM:

Sarajevo: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&#... POIs within Dublin: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&#...

Yes, I know there are areas/countries which are poorly mapped in Google Maps (as your example of Srajevo clearly shows). But generally I've found OSM much worse than Google Maps.

Regarding Dublin - your link has missing POI info, don't know why. Here's a screenshot directly from google maps page: http://cl.ly/1H2r0X2I1U2O3F0j0X2U

You can add the missing items or fix those that are incorrect. Best to start in your own neighborhood. Give it a try, i did.

But OSM can get better, and better faster. I toyed with it just a bit and fixed a few things myself. Google maps? I filed a bug or two, then two years later they closed it as not applicable.

With a sufficient critical mass now in or transitioning to OSM, it's trivial that OSM will get better. If Apple are going to contribute to OSM(which is likely based on their shared project history) then it's expected to increase in quality quickly.

However, even without their contribution, OSM is already at a level of maturity to compete with the bulk of GM implementations. It seems that most people just need basic location services.

Google offers map maker (http://www.google.com/mapmaker) in many countries, so you can modify existing maps or add new data.

I find Google (much) better at address lookup and searching for commercial establishments, but most of the places I've lived/visited have better OSM data in a number of other ways. Google is particularly bad if you're a pedestrian: it seems to be missing a lot of non-auto paths, especially things like urban staircases in hilly cities.

Google (much) better at address lookup

There are 2 problems here: (a) OSM's doesn't have as much house numbering data (that'll improve with time) and (b) addressing → lat/long is pretty freaking hard. If you limit yourself to one country and one address system, it's much easier. Otherwise things get messy fast.

But there are also plenty of applications where Google's higher quality doesn't offer a significant advantage.

At my last job I started to negotiate with Google about their (old) new maps pricing. They kept pointing to features that made no difference for our application. We needed Ok maps and decent forward and reverse geocoding. We were in their free tier, but needeed to find a solution for when we outgrew it, because their pricing was way way too high for our business model.

I left that company, bust if nothing else, this new pricing will further delay the day that they consider replacing Google maps. For new projects though, I'd probably skip google maps altogether, or at least use them in such a way that the client-side code would be totally provider independent.

Many orders of magnitude? What are they charging? 1 cent per 1 million maps?

OpenStreetMaps is free but you've to host it yourself.

There are several free OSM tile servers too, so you don't even need to host yourself. MapQuest's is probably the most generous: you can use it completely free, even in paid apps and webapps. They just request that you let them know in advance if you plan to distribute an app where you anticipate very high usage (currently defined as >4,000 tiles/second). http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/map

Just looked it up and realized that MapQuest went on board with OpenStreetMap back in 2010. I never knew that, props to MapQuest!

Wow, didn't know that, thanks!

>The parties that will ultimately suffer most from this are Navteq and TomTom

Their time is coming up because these companies cannot update at the same pace as the rest of the world. It just costs too much. In many ways, this is similar to why Webkit will dominate as well.

> Their time is coming up because these companies cannot update at the same pace as the rest of the world. It just costs too much. In many ways, this is similar to why Webkit will dominate as well.

Yes, it's exactly like how Windows dominates mobile. Other companies cannot update at the same pace and it just costs too much.

These trends are so easy to follow I wonder why anyone bothers to form their own company or build their own technology.

Oh wait, that's not true is it.

OS development is not the same thing nor are many other categories. There are too many other things at play. This isn't a hard and fast rule that's applicable to everything.

Mapping is different in the sense that it's primary usefulness comes from being accurate and constantly updated. The best way to do this is from crowd-sourced data. As good as Google Maps is, it still has a hard time keeping current.

I mention Webkit in the same post because one of the most fundamental features of any browser is for a site to be rendered correctly. We've seen the worst of this before with IE and ActiveX

Not reportedly: http://corporate.tomtom.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=6820... (Apple-style concise, I guess)

And, reportedly :-), _one_of_the supplierS.

TomTom is reportedly Apple's supplier of map data

Apple get some of their data from OpenStreetMap.

I guess for places where Navtek does not have coverage (similarly to how Google did expand coverage with mapmaker in Africa).

Apple were using OSM in european capital cities aswell…

We switched from Google Maps to OSM because they were too expensive. Now that we are using the Leaflet JS lib, we are really happy with it. Not only is it a fairly nice API, but it is open source, so it is much easier to debug than working with Google's obfuscated code. Even with this price reduction, I see no reason to even consider switching back.

The only downside to OSM is that we needed the tiles served up through https since our site is always https, but there are workarounds for that. ;-)

There's a good discussion on this over at the Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vhj7g/google_sl...

I found this comment very interesting:

"I'm a developer for a major online brand and finding our locations is an utterly crucial part of our business. When Google started charging us for mapping they played hard when coming to a deal to pay for their services. They spelled out a price and there was no negotiating. The arrogance from anyone we had contact with at Google was mind-blowing. We quietly re-developed our location search to use to Bing and pulled the trigger one day. Needless to say Microsoft was more than happy to have our business and was very helpful. As far as mapping, Bing is surprisingly accurate and competitive. We've never looked back. Google wanted over 2 million per year just to show our locations."

about.

damn.

time.

Yes... they'd only recently hiked their prices (last year?) but they shouldn't have in the first place. I'd priced out using google maps for a service, and it was cost prohibitive. However, so was bing maps, and getting a firm price from bing was even harder because my use case didn't fit in 'standard use cases'. In our case, apparently using a mobile app to add metadata to a location constituted 'asset tracking', which puts you in to a whole other level of pricing stratosphere.

I just get the feeling that many mapping apps out there that use google/bing/whatever are totally skirting the actual real pricing and use case terms, much like loads of people copy Photoshop. As long as Adobe turns a blind eye to some level of piracy, it keeps Photoshop top of mind and gives people fewer reasons to seek alternatives.

1. Um, all that map data is actually worth something. It costs money to run cars up and down every street in the country with cameras. It costs money to store those pictures and serve them to billions of people. It costs money to maintain a cutting edge interface. In fact, it basically costs a lot of money everywhere. 2. Open Street Map will be a QA disaster for Apple unless the quality improves rapidly. Google Maps has failed me literally once after almost daily use over the past several years. The quality you get in this sort of problem domain is remarkable.

I know this comes from a consumer standpoint. We had an app based on Google Maps and struggled with the uptick in price. However, we're just spoiled; we really are. There's serious quality present in the Google Maps service.

I'm curious why the hostility. Isn't Google's positioning little more than a simple factor in your decision making process as to which mapping provider you wish to use? Indeed, I'm wondering why the HN crowd isn't _upset_ at the reduced pricing, because now it reduces the incentive to use (and contribute to, improve) OSM.

Yeah, it probably came across as a bit hostile, because trying to get accurate pricing models from various sources was a big pain. Google has/had a lead in this market because of an earlier behaviour of encouraging open/easy use of their maps and APIs. Without much warning, they significantly raised pricing, and now have significantly reduced it, in less than 9 months.

They've lost a lot of credibility, and it's becoming more apparent that the 'do no evil' era mentality there is going away. They didn't drop prices just because they "listened to customers". If they'd bothered to ask customers beforehand, they'd have known $4/1000 is just way too much for most users. Instead, they reacted hastily due to a perceived threat of Apple entering the market, and probably a big exodus of the smaller players who were using them before (also known as tomorrow's larger players).

I think part of the reason for these fluctuations is that certain divisions within Google are under a lot of pressure to be profitable. So maybe Maps were really looking hard to make money because this kind of order came down the line from Page or whomever (I'm sure that division has a comparatively huge budget, with their scale of operations on the ground). After which maybe they realized that the kind of profitability that drives developers away is not what they were looking for.

The whole "do no evil" handwringing is a bit misplaced here, I think. Google is providing a service, they're free to set their prices. They're not trying to sabotage the OSM project, and the api remains free for not for profit use.

If anything - Google was greatly helping the OSM project by directing so much energy towards it.

What does 'do no evil' have to do with this? That was always more about not being another Microsoft and using monopoly power to strangulate and crush promising parts of the tech ecosystem. Their API pricing foibles are a far cry from that.

Well, google started charging WAY too much, so you have folks with started projects that simply became untenable. And the principal of something for free/cheap becoming very expensive after you've built an infrastructure around something is shady at best.

So - my company uses Google maps as the foundation of one of the features of a couple of our products, and, originally, we had free licenses. But the day we started using them, we had a conversation where we wondered what Google was eventually going to charge us, and when they were going to charge us. As it turns out - our original guesses back in 2004, where just a shade lower than what we ended up paying in 2011. Our volume is lower than others, and we get a lot of value out of each map display - so the pricing (around $10,000/year) is just a cost of business. We certainly don't consider it too much for our needs.

On the flip side - if we weren't extracting much in the way of revenue per copy of software, and/or our volume was really high - obviously OSM would be very attractive, and we would be waving bye to Google Maps, and joining that community (and hopefully helping to improve the material by donating to up-and-coming cartographers if we weren't inclined to utilize our GIS skills).

To some degree, I think Google re-enforced a very, very valuable lesson - if something is being offered very free/cheap, and is one of the foundations of your product, and you don't have a license/contract (e.g. GPL/BSD) guaranteeing you that pricing - be aware that you are at the mercy of that third party and plan accordingly.

We see this on HN over, and over, and over again with companies like Apple that end up screwing businesses that rely on the Apple store/iOS - I wonder if PG has written an essay on that - building your house on other people's foundation.

It's about time. It's nice to see Google is feeling the pressure from other (relatively up-and-coming) mapping services like OpenStreetMaps and MapBox to the point where they actually made their prices more competitive. Also I've worked with several large websites who have moved from GMaps to Bing Maps over the past few years.

GMaps is great, but ultimately not worth the price at $4/1000, especially for a small site operator like myself.

I don't like google more and more...when they didn't feel any competition out there, they gave you a very high price. And when there are some other choices, they reduce the price sharply. Why not just give the developers the low price first?

Take the GAE as the example, if you enable billing, you have to pay at least $9 a month, no matter how much more you are using over the quota.

Now, Google is not friendly to developers at all.

GAE is for "big boy" apps not projects for hobbyists. The pricing reflects that.

This price reduction looks like it is only for sites supported by advertising / unmonetised sites.

Any startup planning on charging for an app or service which incorporates any kind of map will still have to pay a minimum $10,000 a year license fee to use Google Maps, which is ridiculously high as a starting point.

What Googles mishandling of the charging changes has done is to heavily publicise the fact that the alternatives (mainly OSM) are now good enough for major companies to switch to without much hassle.

It's possible to use the free API on a commercial site.

I was just going by the "Do I need to use Google Maps API for Business?" in the FAQ here :http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-faq.html .

"If you are charging a fee for access to your Maps solution, whether for a business or consumer audience, you are required to purchase the Maps API Premier."

To me this reads as, any SAAS web app which used a Google map anywhere would be required to pay $10,000 per year plus usage charges.

https://developers.google.com/maps/terms 10.1.2(a): "You must not charge users or any other third party any fee for the use of the Maps API Implementation, the Service, or the Content ... "

You can use it on a commercial site, but the maps implementation must be available to free users. It limits your options but there are plenty of sites that are commercial ventures and work within these limitations.

I don't think that this is actually anything new. I recall similar language when I looked at their maps licensing terms ~four years ago.

When I dug deeper, it appeared, at the time, that this only applied to features of the app that required payment. So, we were free to offer maps features on our site as part of our free offering. We could still have premium features without paying for a premier license, so long as those premium features didn't rely on Google maps.

iOS 6 may be a big part of this. They might have preferred to reduce prices to other customers before but if they offered it to everyone they would have had to offer it to Apple who may have been the majority of their maps revenue and it was also a mechanism to add cost to Android's key competition.

Now Apple are leaving anyway the difference that the price cut makes will be smaller (in absolute terms) and it will not harm Android either.

Good to see OpenStreetMap starting to really shake up geodata.

I wonder if will affect Geocoding limits too?

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#...

"if it will"

You can edit a post ^

Wow this is fantastic news. We are in the process of shifting some of our usage to OSM (and will likely continue) but this makes GMaps a reasonable expense now.

We developed some webbased application using Google Maps and before going in beta, had to change to OSM because of change of Google's pricing structure (we simply cannot afford the 10.000+$ API Premier license fee). But we are hopelessly stuck with OSM are not able to determine the exact location based on address details. Is anyone interested to help out for a few hundred $ ....?

Thank goodness! I made a speed trap tracking (vroomtrap.com -- graveyard) program a while ago that never got off the ground, but when I heard about their price increase, I was dumbfounded. All in all; I have been pretty amazed by Google's new "monetize everything" initiative.
Glad to see that competition from OSM and others is keeping them in check.

I hope they will do same with appengine prices. I'd be willing to return if they had more reasonable pricing.

This doesn't seem to affect their Enterprise prices does it?

Someone's afraid of iOS 6 Beta 2.

A bit too late?

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