11–20 of 114 posts
Not so surprising after Google's recent pricing changes. They reduced the free tier by an order of magnitude and 10xed prices. Google maps is no longer good for hobby projects as the free tier is so low. It's like they're trying to drive away everybody but but big enterprise shops.
Didn't that happen just a week or so ago? I don't think this can be attributed to the pricing change this early.
Not so surprising after Google's recent pricing changes. They reduced the free tier by an order of magnitude and 10xed prices. Google maps is no longer good for hobby projects as the free tier is so low. It's like they're trying to drive away everybody but but big enterprise shops.
That's probably a good business strategy for the future of Maps. The fewer clients you have, the more focused you can be in terms of product development and pricing. This is true in many businesses, actually.
Not so surprising after Google's recent pricing changes. They reduced the free tier by an order of magnitude and 10xed prices. Google maps is no longer good for hobby projects as the free tier is so low. It's like they're trying to drive away everybody but but big enterprise shops.
Mapbox's free tier only gives 50k map views, and only for non-commercial apps. If you're a paid app, you also have to pay $499 per month on top of your usage.
If you wanted this on GMaps, you were stuck rendering all your vectors to image tiles, hugely increasing the size. MapBox's vector support made this very easy! It may be that Google/free options have caught up in this space, but I haven't re-evaluated in a few years.
I think MapBox could also be a winner in the GIS space as the GIS options have not made the most graceful move to the web.
Surprising to see competition in a space that is so dominated by Google. I hoped it’d be some open source endeavor, but seeing the link was Forbes I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up... that said competition and options is good!
I have no evidence to support it, but this article feels like bought and paid for PR.
Surprising to see competition in a space that is so dominated by Google. I hoped it’d be some open source endeavor, but seeing the link was Forbes I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up... that said competition and options is good!
(Full disclosure: used to work at Mapzen)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's probably a good business strategy for the future of Maps. The fewer clients you have, the more focused you can be in terms of product development and pricing. This is true in many businesses, actually.
It's risky to leave customers out that will feed your competition.
If you don't want to serve any customers making under $10M, then other companies serving those customers are not your competition. At least not today. Is there a risk they might take their broader customer base and use it to compete with you upmarket some day? Yes. But that's why you do things like build a brand, relationships, technologies, and other competitive advantages within your niche.
Fancy steakhouses generally don't worry about McDonald's. (Not that this is a perfect analogy to Google vs MapBox. Just speaking generally here in response to your general point.)