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How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

blog.cityflo.com

51–60 of 172 posts

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#52
We moved to Stadia Maps with significant cost reduction, but Stadia matched our use case quite well, I can see others need to stick with Google Maps.

https://www.eventsofa.de/campus/migrating-away-from-google-m...

Shoutout to Stadia Maps CEO who was always very very helpful.

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#53
post #14
post #12

So could increasing pricing under circumstances help to make your customers more creative, more efficient and more ecologically sustainable by making your costumers consume less of your computing power and bandwidth?

Does it matter whether google or the consumer of the google api caches data?

Caching responses might be against ToS, at least with Maps API, AFAIR, you are not allowed to cache (some of?) the results.

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#54
post #43

Well, that's more clever than a company I did due diligence for. Their strategy was to have a pool of API keys attached to new accounts that would take advantage of the Google Maps API free tier, and monitor its usage. As the free tier usage would run out, the system would roll over to a new API key automatically. Wrote that one up in big red marker in my report...

Is that okay in terms of the ToS? How frequently did someone have to create new accounts? Won't Google just ban the server's IP?

Needless to say, that's very much against the TOS and it's a matter of time until they get blocked. Surely at some point it'd be easier and cheaper just to pony up for a license?

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#55
I've build my own tile server map with mapbox gl spec, thx to them, with simple osm features, data about transportation is fair enough to get some basic calculation features, i mean it's a good start, Google maps pricing is insane, if u plan to support thousands of users like us this gonna kill your profitability, we have no money to invest for that part and imo u should be vendor less if u want to develop ur activity til u buisness model works at least

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#56

Like in all of Google's "free" apps, the consumer is the product. They gather your data through Waze and Google maps and sell it for nice money to paying customers. Maybe they can expand on the model a bit and let the paying customers query the API to find out what you were talking while driving. I'm sure that they can find a justification for it. I was trained to think that companies like Google was all about doing…

"don't be evil" - there's a difference.

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#57
Does the API not give timing info for parts of the route like the website does? If it does, then they could just query for first stop to last stop and infer all subtrips.

Also given they seem to own the buses, they could give the drivers a rooted Android phone and get the data by reading the memory (or network traffic after reading the TLS key from memory) of their running instance of Google Maps that they are using to drive, which should be undetectable by Google.

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#58

Like in all of Google's "free" apps, the consumer is the product. They gather your data through Waze and Google maps and sell it for nice money to paying customers. Maybe they can expand on the model a bit and let the paying customers query the API to find out what you were talking while driving. I'm sure that they can find a justification for it. I was trained to think that companies like Google was all about doing…

It got replaced by "do the right thing" about five years ago, and that got scrapped entirely in 2018.

Sounds like you need some retraining.

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#59

Like in all of Google's "free" apps, the consumer is the product. They gather your data through Waze and Google maps and sell it for nice money to paying customers. Maybe they can expand on the model a bit and let the paying customers query the API to find out what you were talking while driving. I'm sure that they can find a justification for it. I was trained to think that companies like Google was all about doing…

Blame them for something that isn't happening. Completely fair criticism.

Re: How We reduced our Google Maps API cost

#60

They mention a 94% budget saving but there's no mention of the drop in accuracy (which I'm sure has occurred)?

That's the one line that kept me reading 'til the end (and never appeared, even though other approaches were dismissed on accuracy grounds)
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