Farewell, Google Maps • Hacker News Board

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#111

Post by ajross » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

tobltobs wrote: post #72

draw_down wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thought the same, there are not many use cases which will be still profitable after this price increase.

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes.

As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#112

Post by Doctor_Fegg » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

zylepe wrote: post #40

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 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.

Photon is the most popular autocomplete solution. Runs fine on an SSD and there are pre-built database dumps you can download. Obviously OSM's address coverage isn't great, which is always going to be the limitation.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#113

Post by MattBlissett » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

spapas82 wrote: post #83

linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources . Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.o…

The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don't mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1].

The download is an SQLite database with a standard-ish structure (MBTiles), you can either write a small server or use theirs.

I needed vector tiles in other projections — WGS84 equirectangualar, an Arctic one, and an Antarctic one. Generating those took many hours on a cluster.

[1] https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#114

Post by r0m4n0 » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

I’m glad I’m not the only one that has this sentiment.

The day that they enabled part of the new quota system my app stopped working (partially my fault for not reading their email) but it turned out to be the day before Election Day for an election app. I call in for support and they tell me that they are rolling out the new quota system and that I have to pay $10,000 if I need to increase my quota limit before the official new quota pay as you go system launches. After the discussion I find out I’m not even talking to google and it was a google partner. Somewhere down the line google just had a partner call me instead.

Long story short I changed the API key to get me past Election Day. Decided I’m moving off google maps asap as well.

I’m willing to pay but... can’t handle their constantly changing policies, their support was terrible, their ask for $10,000 for a short term slightly increased quota was absurd, their new quota system is too expensive.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#115

Post by X-Istence » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

joeblau wrote: post #15

abduhl wrote: post #10

Is this price increase imposed on X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.?

It's imposed on every commercial user of their API which is why a lot of companies are also leaving Google Maps. I talked about this in another post, but Apple[1], Tesla[2], and Uber[3] are all getting off of Google Maps. It seems that Google raised prices to the point where it's actually cheaper to just go and build your own maps or find a lower cost alternative. [1] - https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebu…

Apple hasn't used Google Maps in years...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#116

Post by bassman9000 » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

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…

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.

Ah, the classic Oracle trick. Good to see the tradition is alive.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#117

Post by icantdrive55 » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:52 PM UTC

1. Google offers a free/ low price product. 2. Google raises the price. 3. Entrepreneurs/companies decide to pour money into map products. 4. Google then decided to offer the free product again; because they have the money to spend, and want to get rid of competition. 5. It's time to split up Google's cash cow--yes--the search engine. 6. Google is too powerful now?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#118

Post by anarazel » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #106

paulie_a wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never ever need to explain that you are not a lawyer on an internet post. you can outright claim you are a lawyer without any worries. Cooking meth if you have a valid driver's license is actually legal, I am a lawyer this is legal advice

Not worried about liability, just letting people know that there's a very good chance that I've completely misinterpreted the law. Maybe you're right and it's not useful.

FWIW, I find it helpful. Stating the level of confidence, and that's what IANAL is to some degree, is helpful in judging a statement.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#119

Post by lucb1e » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

Zaskoda wrote: post #103

linsomniac wrote: post #65

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built th…

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.

Uh, while I upvote OSM comments a lot because I often think they are good comments, blindly upvoting based on positive mentions of OSM does not contribute to the conversation...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#120

Post by Symbiote » Thu, Jul 19, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

bflesch wrote: post #102

alrex021 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 20x jump on the monthly charge, especially in lower margin business, will hurt whichever way you look at it, IMHO.

That's exactly what I was suggesting: If you are stuck in a low margin business and see that a provider such as google is screwing up your margins, you should really try to work on another idea which has higher margins. Working on a low margin business is a choice! You can always ditch it and try to find something with higher margins (= higher value created for users).

Did you miss where they wrote "a developing country"? There are places where a software developer's good salary is $10,000 a year.

Google doesn't need to provide a service in that country, but it's understandable that a 20× increase is going to hit harder than in a wealthy country.