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How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

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Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#41

Post by schoen »

Quanttek wrote: post #36

> Widespread adoption has other benefits. Mapbox doesn't need to send out pricey cars or satellites in space to map the world. "Map data is not like food, air, water that's just around. It takes active work to make it," says Young Hahn, Mapbox's CTO. Whenever someone opens a Mapbox map, that person's phone or computer sends three pieces of anonymous data back to the company: longitude, latitude and a time stamp. Thes…

It's strange to say that food is "just around" in urbanized industrial society. Maybe for hunter-gatherers...

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#42

Post by lukeqsee »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #39

Since Google Maps jacked up their prices a few days ago, I've been exploring alternatives, including Mapbox. Unfortunately Mapbox is also very steep for a solo developer developer who wants to build a side project - at least if it's considered 'commercial'. $500 / month for only 250 users, and no way to plan beyond that without inquiring with them about an "enterprise" plan. Also, if anyone from Mapbox is reading thi…

We don't have Places API support, but we definitely are aiming for products from solo devs and smaller businesses at Stadia Maps. We have a few suggestions for places to look when our services have a hole.

For instance, Foursquare has a pretty good places API we've used before.

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#43

Post by dabernathy89 »

wccrawford wrote: post #13
chrishynes wrote: post #5

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.

It depends on your hobby project. Google's free tier gives unlimited map views, commercial or not. (Edit: On native apps.) 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.

Mapbox also gives unlimited map views for native mobile apps. Pricing is instead based on monthly active users (50k free).

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#44

Post by dabernathy89 »

lukeqsee wrote: post #42
dabernathy89 wrote: post #39

Since Google Maps jacked up their prices a few days ago, I've been exploring alternatives, including Mapbox. Unfortunately Mapbox is also very steep for a solo developer developer who wants to build a side project - at least if it's considered 'commercial'. $500 / month for only 250 users, and no way to plan beyond that without inquiring with them about an "enterprise" plan. Also, if anyone from Mapbox is reading thi…

We don't have Places API support, but we definitely are aiming for products from solo devs and smaller businesses at Stadia Maps. We have a few suggestions for places to look when our services have a hole. For instance, Foursquare has a pretty good places API we've used before.

Ah thanks for mentioning Foursquare - I meant to list it. It's another one that has a huge upfront cost for solo devs building a commercial app ($600 / month).

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#45

Post by lukeqsee »

baby wrote: post #21

We're using it for https://www.citymayor.co and it is getting expensive quite quickly (.5 for 1k page views), but the API is really good and the themes are really pretty as well. I've tried playing with open street map directly to create a theme and it was quite a mess.

Check out one of the services that base their data on OpenStreetMap.

My company (https://stadiamaps.com) does that. OpenMapTiles (https://openmaptiles.org) sells vector tiles you can use. There a many more over at https://switch2osm.org/providers/.

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#46

Post by mtmail »

Quanttek wrote: post #36

> Widespread adoption has other benefits. Mapbox doesn't need to send out pricey cars or satellites in space to map the world. "Map data is not like food, air, water that's just around. It takes active work to make it," says Young Hahn, Mapbox's CTO. Whenever someone opens a Mapbox map, that person's phone or computer sends three pieces of anonymous data back to the company: longitude, latitude and a time stamp. Thes…

The Mapbox map is tracking its users. Based on that location data they can derive unmapped roads, turning restrictions, traffic jams (and time-of-day congestion), construction. And feeding other machine learning system to improve the data set. In a recent press release they talk about deployed sensors, no longer users. Google Maps knows when rush hour at your local gym is, Mapbox wants the same. It's a big selling point to their investors because staff editing/fixing the map doesn't scale well.

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#47

Post by peatmoss »

zerebubuth wrote: post #24
bazizbaziz wrote: post #14

Last I checked, MapBox's WebGL based vector tile renderer was a cut above the rest. For simple mapping, Google's stuff may cut it, but MapBox has the ability to draw complex vector polygons over a wide area that render/zoom/scroll fast and provide a nice experience. This is pretty important if you want to provide fine grained analysis of geographic areas. If you wanted this on GMaps, you were stuck rendering all your…

Mapzen, a now sadly defunct mapping startup, also had an awesome (if I say so myself - I used to work there, but not on that team) vector tile renderer for browser and mobile. Check it out at https://github.com/tangrams Also, there was a great interactive style editor ( https://github.com/tangrams/tangram-play ), although it seems the demo site is broken now :-(

RIP Mapzen. I loved how much much you all were contributing to the open source web space.

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#48

Post by lukeqsee »

dabernathy89 wrote: post #44
lukeqsee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have Places API support, but we definitely are aiming for products from solo devs and smaller businesses at Stadia Maps. We have a few suggestions for places to look when our services have a hole. For instance, Foursquare has a pretty good places API we've used before.

Ah thanks for mentioning Foursquare - I meant to list it. It's another one that has a huge upfront cost for solo devs building a commercial app ($600 / month).

> It's another one that has a huge upfront cost for solo devs building a commercial app ($600 / month).

Yeah. :(

This problem seems to extend to the whole industry. Everyone charges big bucks to even very small players. We want to solve pieces of that we can, but it's a tough road to build quality databases.

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#49

Post by puzzle »

chrishynes wrote: post #5

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.

Sounds more like Google is turning it into an actual business. I assumed that MapBox was making some money, given that it relies on OSM and can cut corners, but it isn't.

Re: How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

#50

Post by bluelu »

valar_m wrote: post #3

I have no evidence to support it, but this article feels like bought and paid for PR.

Indeed. We will be switching away from google to an internal tile server for reasons I won't go into detail for now. Our account manager told us that the pricing of the new Google maps will change with their newly announced platform changes and our current usage would cost us now even less than before. When we asked for an offer from mapbox about a year ago, it was already much more expensive than google. I assume it's going to be even harder for them now to win against google now.
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