Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#41

Post by abraham »

acavailhez wrote: post #28
ChrisLTD wrote: post #21

I remember in the 90s when we lambasted Microsoft for cornering markets with free products (IE) so they could drive out the competition (Netscape) and eventually start charging for them when we had no other choice. Luckily that never really happened, Microsoft never started charging for IE. While Google isn't exactly doing that here, it's coming awfully close.

I agree with that, it is quite similar to what they did with youtube and the unbearing amount of ad that one has to endure before watching a video now, after 5 years+ of making it available free of annoyance.

Uploaders of videos can enable/disable the inStream ads. They are not required by Google. http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=1...

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#42

Post by ceol »

pbz wrote: post #23
ceol wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that Google's Apps pricing is steep, but I don't think they're marketing it towards the average guy who just wants a couple of email accounts for his personal site. I think they're marketing it towards businesses and schools who see $50/acct/yr as pennies compared to hosting their own email server, hiring a sysadmin (or telling their current admin to handle it), and then supporting that server all da…

Exactly, you're either small and use the free version or you're very big and $50/a/y is no big deal. There's nothing in-between. I know quite a few companies who would gladly pay something, even if the free version works for them.

I'd like the option to maybe pay $50/yr for 20 or 30 accounts. I have a couple of sites that need more than 10 accounts but can't justify paying $50 per.

But who knows? Maybe Google saw that most businesses use 15 or 20 email accounts, so if they offered something like that, they'd lose a lot of money.

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#43

Post by fr0sty »

jquery wrote: post #40
7952 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. If you use 30,000 a day you will pay $20, or only $0.66 per one thousand. They are giving you over 9 million requests a year for free. Its not unreasonable to expect the profit from that to help subsidize the excess,

Sure, if you plan on staying small and never growing, this is fine. But you can't build your site for growth staring at the edge of an $4-8/CPM marginal cost (in addition to all your other overhead!). $4-8/CPM is far more than most ad networks pay. Perhaps Google is deliberately trying to get rid of most major GMaps users. If they follow through on this, they will be successful.

Sounds like they are trying to push their high-bandwidh users to enterprise pricing.

The $10k/yr Enterprise licence works out to $27/day which breaks even with the incremental pricing at 58k visits/day.

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#44

Post by mildweed »

willfully_lost wrote: post #27
lftl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Maps API is different than the Geocode in that the Maps API requires you to grab a key here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html So to avoid it in that sense you'd have to force every one of your clients to go grab an API key and input it.

Look at the note at the top of the page you linked, Version 3 of the Maps API doesn't require a key.

Not only does v3 not require an API key, as of Sept 28 (a couple days before the rate limiting went into effect) sending a v2 API key to v3 will cause the request to fail:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3-notify/...

Sounds like they're laying the ground work for v3 to use API keys again.

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#46

Post by 7952 »

untog wrote: post #5
jroseattle wrote: post #4

This has an MBA-in-charge smell about it. I'm not certain how many GMap implementations there are that exceed a 25k/day load, but my back-of-the-napkin guesstimation is But, those are exactly the sites that I want using my maps, instead of Yahoo or Bing or some other provider. Unless there's something I'm missing, this seems penny-wise and pound-foolish.

There's actually not a huge benefit to Google in my site using Google Maps instead of Yahoo Maps. There is a branding benefit for sure, but there are no links to Google services, no ads, or anything like that. I've been wondering for a long time when this would come- the processing (getting directions, geocoding, etc) and bandwidth (for map images) demands must be huge, with comparatively little payback. It'll be int…

Don't forget the cost of the actual data. Remote sensing satellites are not cheap. Google Maps is heavily dependant on a few companies who provide the bulk of the data.

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#47

Post by alphamale3000 »

magicalist wrote: post #37
alphamale3000 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10,000$ per million page views per year. So it's 10$ per 1000, more than the 8$ or 4$ per 1000 that was announced. I don't know any big site that gets more than 10$ per 1000 pageviews with ads. It's insane!

that can't be right. the limits here get you 25k*365=9,125,000 views per year for free.

it is right... with the premier pricing.

EDIT: fill in the form you'll get the pricing... 10k$ upfront for 10MM views: http://www.google.com/support/enterprise/bin/request.py?cont...

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#48

Post by easp »

fr0sty wrote: post #43
jquery wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you plan on staying small and never growing, this is fine. But you can't build your site for growth staring at the edge of an $4-8/CPM marginal cost (in addition to all your other overhead!). $4-8/CPM is far more than most ad networks pay. Perhaps Google is deliberately trying to get rid of most major GMaps users. If they follow through on this, they will be successful.

Sounds like they are trying to push their high-bandwidh users to enterprise pricing. The $10k/yr Enterprise licence works out to $27/day which breaks even with the incremental pricing at 58k visits/day.

Isn't $10k/yr just the starting price of the enterprise license, don't they have tiered pricing there too?

Re: Google warns that rate limits, overage fees are coming to Maps API

#49

Post by easp »

redstripe wrote: post #12
randall wrote: post #6

They say the premiere service will be cheaper than the overage. http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-compare.html Unfortunately, they don't list pricing in an obvious way.

I beleive it's 10K per year.

It starts at $10K a year.
Post reply on HN