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Farewell, Google Maps

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Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#451

Post by ryanmercer »

chrisan wrote: post #428
ryanmercer wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs…

> People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up". For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing. Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know)…

>For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.

Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to.

If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product.

It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business.

Does the power company hand out free power?

Does the water company hand out free water?

Does the phone company let you have free calls?

No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia.

I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing.

In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it.

People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out.

All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#452

Post by mxuribe »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #99

Having used/managed/dealt Google Maps enterprise product, I can say, it alone has made me _hate_ and not trust Google. These price hikes are laughable... Support forums/forms are buried deep and inaccessible via Google search (or were), and for technical support you're required to use some obscure login to contact someone. People may or may not reply to you in at timely manner, and sales reps don't give a shit about…

A big +1 on this one. In a previous role, my organization leveraged google maps enterprise for tons of money, and the support sucked something awful.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#453

Post by quirkot »

dmurray wrote: post #387
da_chicken wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service. It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see…

> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.

Cost doesn't set price. Value sets price

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#454

Post by GenericsMotors »

atr2 wrote: post #413
GenericsMotors wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did. They're web developers, and you're suggesting they don't know how to manipulate the DOM? > This email is FORGED, and I'd like to know why. The fact you're using a throwaway account to make the accusation suggests you're not too sure yourself, and you know your "evidence" is beyond flim…

I am 100% sure that font is Roboto, while the rest of the email is written using Helvetica. This is not a throwaway, I just registered.

> I am 100% sure that font is Roboto

Okay this is just ridiculous. Have you tried searching Google for the string that you think is forged?

Try searching for the following, taken from the "fake" portion of the email: "based on your high usage it appears you are eligible for volume pricing discounts, enterprise-grade customer support, and/or offline contracts"

The very first hit is one of Google's pricing pages for their Maps platform:

https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch...

Which says (highlight added by me):

    When do I need an Enterprise account?

    Businesses with high-volume usage who are looking for volume pricing discounts,
    **enterprise-grade** customer support, and/or offline contracts should contact
    us about setting up an Enterprise account.
They've obviously reused text between this page and their client update emails. Now please explain how this fits into your conspiracy theory.

EDIT:

The font used on Google's pricing page is Roboto, which means that the discrepancy is Google's fault as someone obviously did a bad copy/paste job when preparing emails for clients.

If nothing else, you have a good eye for fonts I guess.

Care to retract your accusation now?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#455

Post by zmk_ »

rmc wrote: post #337
rurban wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same. I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.

> I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It's named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also. I'm not sure what you mean with "free"/"open". The OSM licence has a share-alike part if you merge your own map data with OSM data. If you just have a map and put points on it, it'd be fine.

It's not free as in you are not allowed to use OSM tiling servers for commercial purposes. "OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. [...] OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not." [1]. They've even banned some sites for abusing their servers, e.g., FastPokeMap in 2016 [2]. But there is a very clear way of switching to OSM and serving your own map tiles with any styling you want [3]. I personally think that startups like these should go for these options since their user base is concentrated in one region.

[1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ [2] https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/pull/78 [3] https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#456

Post by thecrazyone »

emn13 wrote: post #333
callalex wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wording was a bit confusing, but I think the GP meant that Google _thinks_ they have no competition so can get away with sudden price gouging.

Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.

A good competitor can make a drop in replacement possible by aligning their api with that of google's

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#457

Post by thecrazyone »

amelius wrote: post #418
wwweston wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is why Google's generic services should be commoditized as quickly as possible.

I agree, but is it _that_ easy? Not like no one has tried

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#458

Post by mjwhansen »

What's being missed here is that this is, in some ways, a return to normal for Google Maps. Google only introduced pay-as-you-go Maps API access in September 2015[1]. Before that, you could get 2,500 free per day. If you needed more, you had to sign a $10-20,000/yr enterprise contract. That was it. There was no pay-as-you-go access. If you needed just 5,000 or 15,000 a day, you were SOL. (That's a big reason we launched Geocod.io in the first place, because we found ourselves in that unserved middle of the market.)

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/google-introduces-uncompli...

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#460

Post by ashtube »

The problem I find is that when these alternative services see how many people are leaving Google Maps and switching to them, those companies will then raise their prices to "remain competitive".

Business is business and if they can see an opportunity to make more revenue, they'll do it, whether it be Google or anyone else. It's just a matter of time.

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