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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

$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.

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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/

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

"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.

(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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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