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Farewell, Google Maps

inderapotheke.de

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#41

Post by matte_black »

ericd wrote: post #7

"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…

On the other hand, if you are a business making real money, these price changes are no big deal. This happens all the time. Where some people see a sob story, I see a competitor getting stamped out.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#42

Post by draw_down »

wwweston wrote: post #16
ericd wrote: post #7

"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…

While I've experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than: * shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service * changing your terms of service to forbid an ac…

Jacking up the price so far that it becomes prohibitive to actually use, on short notice, isn't much different from shutting it down, is it? In both cases you suddenly can't use the service anymore.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#43

Post by supernova87a »

RestlessMind wrote: post #21

> Importantly, prices are the same from US to the Africa, despite the fact that revenue generation is vastly different in most developed countries compared to the others. This can be understood in two ways: 1. Cost of serving is the same from US to Africa (datacenters, network bandwidth, engineering etc), so prices are same 2. If #1 results in less adoption from developing countries, it is okay because they are not t…

Yeah, if Google had differential pricing for something that costs them the same to produce, I'm sure you would soon find innovative middlemen who make it their business to source the Maps from lower cost priced countries to higher ones.

Just like travel agents or passengers find ways to take cheaper flights from countries or city pairs that airlines price differently to help capture more market, even though it doesn't cost them very different to provide the service.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#44

Post by alrex021 »

In our own experience, we pleaded the fact that those dollar figures are just beyond workable if you consider the fact that we come from a developing country and we're faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#45

Post by kirchhoff »

It's as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative.

I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / month.

Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been reaching out to such entities individually, offering their 'premium plan' service.

The pricing for the (old) premium plan was remarkably similar to the new pricing which now applies to everyone.

This pricing change has ended the era of Google Maps mashups / hobby projects.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#46

Post by pkaye »

b212 wrote: post #19

There'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 (…

> They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month...

How much of that $1300 is based on getting some freebies or low pices by staying below some usage threshold? Will they come upon additional costs on other services as they scale up?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#47

Post by qwert-e »

b212 wrote: post #19

There'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 (…

Wow, people really do just read headlines nowadays...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#48

Post by mapperguy »

A lot of people forget that Mapbox did a similar move with their $499/mo price hike for commercial apps + pay as you go. Then later they simply switched all of their old users to the new pricing.

Not to mention when I called to ask about Enterprise pricing years ago, it was $7,500/yr. 9 months later it became $25,000/yr.

I have no trust in neither Google Maps nor Mapbox.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#49

Post by ddoolin »

bambax wrote: post #33

It'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'd think you can cache results of geocoding either direction as their results should hardly change. Not sure of the usage model but if it involves repeated look ups, this should be OK if it doesn't break any terms.
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