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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

#111

Post by lakomen »

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…

It claims that it's self hostable, maybe it's because I'm on the phone right now, but I couldn't find any self hosting instructions.

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

#112

Post by maxerickson »

lakomen wrote: post #111
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…

It claims that it's self hostable, maybe it's because I'm on the phone right now, but I couldn't find any self hosting instructions.

The thing being discussed is designed for cloud, so I think self managed is a better description?

https://protomaps.com/docs/cdn

Self hosting pmtiles is straightforward also, make a file available to a server that supports range requests:

https://protomaps.com/docs/pmtiles#2.-serve-your-file-locall...

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

#113

Post by mkup »

rwalle wrote: post #98
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.

"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.

I don't understand you. I have said that Hetzner is not going to suspend my account (or deprive me of customer support) on the grounds of paying too little per month. What kind of data point you need? I am the data point. I'm their customer since 2015.

The general point I was trying to make is not an advertisement of particular hosting provider, but the fact that traditional hosting providers are totally fungible. If tomorrow this company goes bonkers and starts doing stupid things, then I just migrate to OVH, DigitalOcean, Vultr or any other competitor on this market. But unlike traditional hosting providers, there is no market among big cloud providers, as they are not fungible on the customer API level, so each of them is actually a monopoly. And monopoly is generally no good for customers. The rest can be deduced from this principle.

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

#114

Post by juliangoldsmith »

Does anyone know whether OpenAddresses is actually usable for an API?

A few years back, I built something to do reverse geocoding based on Google Maps's prices. I never actually released it because I wasn't confident the coverage was good enough.

I guess it might be worth dusting it off and seeing if someone finds it useful.

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

#115

Post by c0nsumer »

jmnicolas wrote: post #101
c0nsumer wrote: post #40

Can any of you suggest a nice tutorial or something for rendering maps for self-hosting at much higher zoom levels? Many of these examples are for larger areas where zoom level 10 is sufficient, but I make hobby maps of mountain bike / hiking trails where the displayed area is only ~10km wide at the most with lots of fine detail. Thus, my maps tend to be shown at zoom levels 12-18, which is much higher than any of th…

I'm not sure of exactly what you need but a few years ago I toyed with my own OSM server. There was a tuto on a site named linuxbabe to install everything on Ubuntu. FWIW I generated all the tiles up to zoom 18 for France (which is the best mapped country as far as OSM go), it represented about 300 GB of data. You will need a big SSD, 16 GB ram for a big country, 32 GB for Europe, I think you can do the world with 64…

Thanks! I'm talking something /much/ smaller. Probably... 25km^2 at most. It, thankfully, won't be nearly that complicated.

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

#116

Post by brian-bk »

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]

Google's data suite (bigquery, ai) is unmatched imo but I agree -- prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp. Google has proved time and time again that they have awful support. I've seen plenty of gcp incidents and every support thread is them gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues. One time we had our dependencies on Google breaking and google suite reported the outage but gcp didn't, gcp support still tried to deny that gcp had any issues.

It's funny that AWS support isn't super great absolutely, but relatively boy their support is amazing. They will at least acknowledge there was an issue on their end.

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

#117

Post by pirsquare »

brian-bk wrote: post #116
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]

Google's data suite (bigquery, ai) is unmatched imo but I agree -- prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp. Google has proved time and time again that they have awful support. I've seen plenty of gcp incidents and every support thread is them gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues. One time we had our dependencies on Google breaking and google suite reported the outage but gcp didn't, gcp support s…

"prod realtime apps shouldn't run on gcp."

YES! Everyone should read this. Google Cloud will shutdown your servers for the slightest stupid reason. NEVER EVER run any production apps with Google Cloud. -

"gaslighting that the customer is wrong, gcp had no issues"

YES this is my experience except in my case they didn't gaslight me and instead avoid giving a resolution. -

I run a business that hundreds of paying customers (ecom stores) relies on and I'm a 4 yrs customer with Google Cloud.

They shutdown all my servers last Friday for the slightest stupid reason and don't give a fuck to rectify things fast. 3 days now and they still haven't gave me a resolution.

On paper, my servers were shutdown for at least more than 72 hrs and it's still ongoing.

Context: https://www.onvoard.com/blog/our-production-servers-was-susp...

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

#118

Post by tracker1 »

rwalle wrote: post #98
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.

"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.

I wouldn't say that... there are a LOT of sites that operate at under $1k/month spend. If you lose 10k customers for one big fish, is it worth it? I know it's not apples to apples, but still can really matter. And just maybe it's not worth supporting a bigger player in that case altogether.

And for the bigger fish, if it's me, I'm one to push for complete containerization and orchestration beyond simple DBAS service for PostgreSQL, depending on needs for scale. Which absolutely means switching can be easy enough.

The only advantage the big cloud providers have is the services for the lower-middle tier customers.

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