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Google Maps Platform

cloud.google.com

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Re: Google Maps Platform

#231

Post by nomad543 »

nomad543 wrote: post #217
zenovision wrote: post #188

I just compared pricing for different providers and here are my results: Usage: 10000 requests / day Google Maps: (3600000 - (28000free * 12)) / 1000 * 7 = 22848 $ per year Yandex Maps: 360000 rubles or 5600$ per year, but much cheaper for higher volumes than 10000/day Mapbox: (3600000 - (50000free * 12)) / 1000 * 0.5 + (fix 500 * 12) = 7500 $ per year Bing Maps: No pricing on website, need to contact support

I've been researching alternatives and Mapfit offers 100,000 API requests a day for free. I haven't read the documentation but looks very promising.

Well a truly bizarre thing happened, the Mapfit staff just altered the text on their pricing box from 100,000/day to 2,500/day (Google cache confirms). Doesn't look very professional.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#232

Post by elyobo »

It seems like sticking a CDN in front of the static map API could be used to reduce costs quite a bit there as well, especially if you forced it to cache more aggressively than the cache control headers returned by Google indicate. Has anyone tried this?

Re: Google Maps Platform

#233

Post by yurishimo »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #193

What they don't tell you is the underlying data is of extremely dubious quality. It's a hodgepodge of proprietary data, data automatically generated from satellite imagery and open government data from various sources all merged together in an automatic or at least thoroughly non-expert way. To a cartography geek it's an absolute nightmare.

I think a lot of people are using the stylized Map views over the satellite views. I’m my experience, those are pretty good for showing where things are, maybe if not topographically accurate.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#234

Post by yurishimo »

nomad543 wrote: post #231
nomad543 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been researching alternatives and Mapfit offers 100,000 API requests a day for free. I haven't read the documentation but looks very promising.

Well a truly bizarre thing happened, the Mapfit staff just altered the text on their pricing box from 100,000/day to 2,500/day (Google cache confirms). Doesn't look very professional.

They’ve probably been getting hammered with signups. It sucks they pulled such an underhand move but it’s obvious why they did it.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#235

Post by n_u_l_l »

Google can change their prices at any time, and they just proved that they do.

There is some kind of trust I have/had in cloud providers to be fair when it comes down to vendor lock-in. One of the things I expect a cloud provider to do is not suddenly increase prices and instead give their clients a reasonable period (a year would be perfect, but I think 6 months is a reasonable period) so they can change their usage to minimize their new costs according to the new pricing or transfer to another provider if the costs are too high.

But Google just proved that they don’t really care about their clients. If you made an app that heavily relied on the Google Maps API, and you spend $3K a month now, you just received a mail that your costs might be increasing to $60K a month and you might need to drop all your current projects/tasks to migrate the app to another service.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#236

Post by IanCal »

elyobo wrote: post #225
IanCal wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think 2 would work, we use static maps and they only work based on the site they're loaded from. They won't even work on our dev instance because I've not whitelisted the domain. Unless lots of people are going to your actual site, of course.

I have a project which runs a variety of sites for our network - currently ~900 different domains. Restricting keys by domain name is not really practical for us.

A list of 900 isn't really a huge problem, is it?

Do they share anything common (many x.mycompany.com)? You can use wildcards.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#237

Post by n_u_l_l »

sleemanj wrote: post #125

Gah, this is so confusing, I've got small sites developed for clients many many years old running various maps based stuff off API Keys in my account, now I have to add MY billing information to them or get the client to set themselves up a google cloud platform account and developer and project and keys and ...... Good grief, that's totally impractical to have website administrators, my clients, to do that, even I a…

It is totally hidden but you don’t actually have to add a billing account if you’re sure that you stay below the $200 monthly usage. You can find it here: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch... "Is a credit card or billing account required?"

I also experienced similar issues when I was still freelancing and managed the hosting for some clients.

I wanted to host clients on Google Cloud or AWS but letting clients make an account they are unable to manage looked like a bad idea to me. If their website gets a lot of unexpected (maybe unwanted) traffic, they get a large bill which they blame me for. Because of this reason I had to go with shared hosting for small clients, and Heroku for companies that cared about uptime so everyone always knew what the costs are.

Something like billing limits would fix this. So freelancers could host their clients websites on their own account (or using AWS organizations) and charge their clients the billing limit for a year upfront.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#238

Post by ijanos »

lathiat wrote: post #128
robocat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS11 added a "Desktop view" mode but I am not sure the feature is well known (Android has had the feature forever, so by mobile, you mean iOS I think). From memory, in Safari, tap share, then scroll across to desktop view. I don't have an iDevice with me at moment, but it should work.

Tap Share, then "Request Desktop Site" However I have found that it is quite unreliable at working. Not sure if it's just changing the viewport for CSS, or the user-agent, or what. But it frequently doesn't work.

you can long-touch the refresh button for quick access

Re: Google Maps Platform

#239

Post by jaakl »

mtmail wrote: post #84
puzzle wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long does it take for an edit to propagate from OSM to Mapbox's tiles? Average/worst case. I know this is a tough problem, so I don't envy you. :-)

Mapbox no longer guarantees a time ( https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/913812009547902978 ) Worst I've read about is 3 months. That surprising because openstreetmap.org's tile servers aim for sub-10 minute updates and often I see my changes even faster. https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=61040

OSM sub-10 minute updates really depends on zoom level and data. With low zooms the update can take weeks even there, as I recently learned in a hard way. It is more important to have consistent and laundered map data than someone's last minute changes.

Re: Google Maps Platform

#240

Post by jaakl »

jstandard wrote: post #91
reustle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I contribute to Google maps a lot and I've looked into contributing to open street maps but the options seemed pretty clunky. I recommend mapbox to all of my clients over Google maps.

I've been looking into Mapbox lately. What types of things do you find they're strong vs. weak at?

Main/only weak thing of Mapbox is that they are not free and unlimited for mobile apps, Google seems to remain that.
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