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Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

protomaps.com

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Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#91

Post by c0nsumer »

bdon wrote: post #77
c0nsumer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but that's the problem, the data downloads they offer are not zoomed enough. So I want to know how to go closer. This presumes you already have tiles.

The z0-14 tilesets from https://app.protomaps.com/downloads/small_map should be good enough for street-level mapping with overzooming. You can email me at brandon@protomaps.com if this doesn't fit your needs yet.

Thanks, I'll give it a look, but I need a different style as well. This is the sort of thing I'm looking to completely self-host: https://trailmaps.app/ramba/

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#92

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

yunohn wrote: post #28
gniv wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $350 versus $0.50! It's not as impressive as you make it sound. The real value of the Maps API is in 1) routing and 2) local business details. These are both hard for anybody else to provide, so Google prices them accordingly. The price for the tiles is just an extension to the overall pricing.

Exactly this. Google Maps isn’t charging for raw bandwidth/storage. They spend massive amounts on R&D to make Maps the most useful and competitive global mapping solution. This comes at a cost, which is completely different than using community-maintained partially-complete OSM maps.

A little naughty to describe OSM as "partially complete" but not Google. Last time I looked, Google didn't have a fraction of the footpaths or cycleways around here that OSM has.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#93

Post by mkup »

dachryn wrote: post #37
pirsquare wrote: post #18

Google Map 10X their price on a single price change. Never trust Google Cloud or run any production servers with them. They have zero empathy for you. Just today, we got screwed by Google Cloud (as a 4 yrs customer) when they abruptly shutdown our production servers just because we didn't fill up a form on-time. My story: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Liao/status/1634103410525077504 (happens today) [Link Updated]

a 400 month customer is really a tiny fish, don't expect special treatment without support packages. Do you even have an enterprise contract with them? The bronze contract can be had from 0 spend, and gives the option to pay through invoicing and have support. Or are you just going through credit card which is intended for hobby use? I am not defending them, but this is totally on you. What was the missing informatio…

Fortunately traditional hosting providers like Hetzner won't suspend me even if I pay $10/month on average. That's why I avoid Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and AWS like a plague. I prefer to have a freedom to switch my hosting provider at any time, even if that sometimes means more infrastructure work. That kind of attitude to customers, as GCP usually has, is just not for me, thanks.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#94

Post by bdon »

alexmuro wrote: post #84
bdon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution I described in the blog post is an optional layer on top designed for high traffic deployments, see here: https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn As most storage systems like S3 aren't free and have per-request fees, the price is pretty comparable to this CDN deployment. Protomaps is very intentionally built with little in common with Mapbox; the main shared parts are using the same Protocol Buffers vector tile f…

Firstly, I just want to say thanks for the reply, but more so thanks for your work, its moving opensource mapping forward. In my work we are looking at switching from mbtiles hosted with tilserver-gl( https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl ) to pmtiles to remove a server process. But we were self hosting already and we are already using maplibre-gl 2. I can see why the implementation in the blog post would be bett…

Some CDNs handle range requests; the purpose of introducing Lambda/Workers here is to transform normal Z/X/Y URLs into range requests, so you can use PMTiles with any client like MapLibre Native or legacy code without loading a plugin.

Protomaps actually has its own vector renderer different from Mapbox GL or MapLibre at https://github.com/protomaps/protomaps.js . It does use a handful of low-level Mapbox JavaScript libraries, but otherwise was consciously developed to be 100% separate from existing Mapbox rendering and styling code, and has an objectively inferior (Leaflet) user experience.

In practice, most serious uses of Protomaps are now using MapLibre GL, so there will be more focus going on that in the project going forward.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#95

Post by soperj »

zeitg3ist wrote: post #88

In these discussions I rarely see Apple Maps mentioned, but I just checked and MapKit JS includes 25,000 requests per day with a $99 yearly Apple Developer subscription. Considering the cost of the alternatives, even if you don’t care about iOS development, it might be worth it to get one just for MapKit.

This is double the number of requests for 50cents per month if they're doing their comparison properly.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#96

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

tiffanyh wrote: post #79
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #8

The real meat of this story: > A web application with 50,000 map loads using the Google Maps API will cost $350 per month. > A similar amount of traffic running through a Protomaps CDN install on Cloudflare, with an average of 20 tiles per session, costs fifty cents in Cloudflare Workers request fees. $350 versus $0.50! Who's going to be the first to build a (maybe Google Maps-compatible?) API on top of this and sell…

> Who's going to be the first to build a (maybe Google Maps-compatible?) API There would be some irony if a 3rd-party monetize off of Google shoulders a compatible-API to their Map service. Given that's what they did to Java.

Embrace and extend :)

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#97

Post by guhidalg »

dachryn wrote: post #37
pirsquare wrote: post #18

Google Map 10X their price on a single price change. Never trust Google Cloud or run any production servers with them. They have zero empathy for you. Just today, we got screwed by Google Cloud (as a 4 yrs customer) when they abruptly shutdown our production servers just because we didn't fill up a form on-time. My story: https://twitter.com/Ryan_Liao/status/1634103410525077504 (happens today) [Link Updated]

a 400 month customer is really a tiny fish, don't expect special treatment without support packages. Do you even have an enterprise contract with them? The bronze contract can be had from 0 spend, and gives the option to pay through invoicing and have support. Or are you just going through credit card which is intended for hobby use? I am not defending them, but this is totally on you. What was the missing informatio…

> I am not defending them, but this is totally on you.

You are defending them. Unless OP is disingenuous, the reputational loss of an unhappy customer is hard to shake. Customers will make mistakes, if the cloud provider doesn't have automated systems to catch and prevent those mistakes then they aren't doing well in customer service.

A similar thing happened to me with my personal Azure spend, but I felt they handled it much better simply by communicating early and often when there was a problem processing payment. I had time to respond and fix my subscription, so I stayed a happy customer.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#98

Post by rwalle »

mkup wrote: post #93
dachryn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a 400 month customer is really a tiny fish, don't expect special treatment without support packages. Do you even have an enterprise contract with them? The bronze contract can be had from 0 spend, and gives the option to pay through invoicing and have support. Or are you just going through credit card which is intended for hobby use? I am not defending them, but this is totally on you. What was the missing informatio…

Fortunately traditional hosting providers like Hetzner won't suspend me even if I pay $10/month on average. That's why I avoid Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and AWS like a plague. I prefer to have a freedom to switch my hosting provider at any time, even if that sometimes means more infrastructure work. That kind of attitude to customers, as GCP usually has, is just not for me, thanks.

"switch my hosting provider at any time"

Sorry, obviously you are not the kind of customer that the three big players care about.

Also, I hope you could show real data points for the comment regarding Hetzner instead of just putting a very questionable claim here.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#99

Post by rcarr »

mkup wrote: post #93
dachryn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a 400 month customer is really a tiny fish, don't expect special treatment without support packages. Do you even have an enterprise contract with them? The bronze contract can be had from 0 spend, and gives the option to pay through invoicing and have support. Or are you just going through credit card which is intended for hobby use? I am not defending them, but this is totally on you. What was the missing informatio…

Fortunately traditional hosting providers like Hetzner won't suspend me even if I pay $10/month on average. That's why I avoid Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and AWS like a plague. I prefer to have a freedom to switch my hosting provider at any time, even if that sometimes means more infrastructure work. That kind of attitude to customers, as GCP usually has, is just not for me, thanks.

I've just coded my latest site using aws but I'm going to be teaching myself terraform in the coming week so I can rewrite the infrastructure as code so I can move providers easily if I ever have any problems in the future.

Re: Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API

#100

Post by rirze »

rcarr wrote: post #99
mkup wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately traditional hosting providers like Hetzner won't suspend me even if I pay $10/month on average. That's why I avoid Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and AWS like a plague. I prefer to have a freedom to switch my hosting provider at any time, even if that sometimes means more infrastructure work. That kind of attitude to customers, as GCP usually has, is just not for me, thanks.

I've just coded my latest site using aws but I'm going to be teaching myself terraform in the coming week so I can rewrite the infrastructure as code so I can move providers easily if I ever have any problems in the future.

Terraform is not going to make you cloud-agnostic. If you switch cloud providers, you'll still use Terraform but you will have to rewrite much, if not all, of your TF code.
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