Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#1

Post by thecodemonkey » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:03 PM UTC

Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding
geocod.io

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#2

Post by thecodemonkey » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:23 PM UTC

We were tired with dealing with the often steep pricing on geocoding when you reach your daily free limit (e.g. Google Maps starts at $10k/year). So I built this service so I can use it myself and hopefully it would be useful for others too.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#3

Post by jaque » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:26 PM UTC

so.. us addresses only?

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#4

Post by chippy » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:27 PM UTC

Also free http://geocoder.us/

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#5

Post by thecodemonkey » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:30 PM UTC

jaque wrote: post #3

so.. us addresses only?

Yep! Unfortunately we will manually have to add support for each country (including getting data, normalizing it, etc.) which is quite some work. We're planning to add support for additional countries if demand is high enough.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#6

Post by lzhou » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:30 PM UTC

For an API, you can also try http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/ (which is kinda free -- and uses OpenStreetMap data).

The biggest problem we've had is changing non well-formed addresses / ambiguous addresses into canonical addresses with lat/lng. Google Maps wins on that front.

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#7

Post by vitalyny » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:32 PM UTC

This is very cool! We use SmartyStreets because of the price. Where did you get the addresses database?

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#8

Post by cjauvin » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:33 PM UTC

I've been doing freelance geocoding gigs for a couple of institutions in the past years (canadian addresses), with only open source tools and data.

I also wrote a primer explaining the basic geocoding ideas:

http://cjauvin.blogspot.ca/2012/04/lean-geocoding.html

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#9

Post by joelverhagen » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:34 PM UTC

Neat website! Very clean, simple pricing. Thank you for batch geocoding to minimize network traffic...

How does the accuracy (as well as address parsing capabilities) compare to the completely free solutions such as Nominatim[1] or DSTK[2]?

Both services provide capabilities for local installations, obviously with no query limits and minimal latency.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

[2] http://www.datasciencetoolkit.org/

Re: Show HN: Ridiculously cheap bulk geocoding

#10

Post by jsumrall » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 2:34 PM UTC

Interesting. What interesting things can you do once you geocode a street address? How are you (your business) using this?