This talks mostly about road map tiles. Has anyone found any good options for satellite image tiles? Mapbox resells DigitalGlobe imagery but would cost over $1k/month for my site so I’m looking for an alternative with more attractive pricing options
Farewell, Google Maps
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Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#32There's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs. They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing). Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (…
This thread is precisely about that company
It's a good TL;DR of the article but I'm not sure it's intentional :)
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#33It's not hard to produce your own tiles from OpenStreetMap data and serve them from your own server using something as Leaflet. If you only need to show maps, and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if), this is the way to go.
What is very hard is coming up for a replacement of either geocoding/reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don't really work or are quite difficult to setup (IMHO).
Best of luck!
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#34Is this price increase imposed on X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.?
I'm sure it is, but they can afford it...
This is actually my real question: can these companies afford it? If a company has X months of runway and their Maps costs just went up by a factor of 11 then Google may have just gone from "less than payroll" to "more expensive than our devs".
Is this Google trying to move into a new space?
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#35I work for a startup that has mapping/routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google's mapping APIs was too great and decided to work on having a switchable backup provider in case something like this should ever happen.
With auto complete especially, we would have had a 10-20x increase in pricing (and this is with an 'enterprise' plan pricing). As the article says, we were basically given 2 months notice for an enormous price hike that would likely render the business untenable. Luckily we were able to put our backup plan into action, but changes like this really erode the confidence to use Google (at least for mapping) in the future unfortunately.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#36"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…
Is there something like Amazon or Google shopping with a list of prices for all products through time? Kind of like the Wayback Machine (archive.org) but for products. Maybe having a searchable historical database of everything imaginable and their prices would keep companies honest and prevent price gouging.
Something like a PaaS Price zombie https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360262?
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#37Is this price increase imposed on X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.?
Large customers always pay lower negotiated per-unit prices due to volume.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#38"Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For ex…
Is there something like Amazon or Google shopping with a list of prices for all products through time? Kind of like the Wayback Machine (archive.org) but for products. Maybe having a searchable historical database of everything imaginable and their prices would keep companies honest and prevent price gouging.
That's a really neat idea! Maybe include alerting and the ability to "follow" services you use to monitor their prices?
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#39There's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs. They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing). Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (…
Pretty sure you linked to the same article that we're discussing here.
Re: Farewell, Google Maps
#40It's not hard to produce your own tiles from OpenStreetMap data and serve them from your own server using something as Leaflet. If you only need to show maps, and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if), this is the way to go. What is very hard is coming up for a replacement of either geocoding/reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don't really work or are quite difficul…
I had very good luck with graphhopper for routing. On digitalocean it costs about $10 to process planet.osm and the server can run on as small as a $40/month droplet.
I am having trouble finding a good autocomplete/geo search solution though, curious if anyone has found a decent quality provider or solution you can self host like graphhopper.