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

71–80 of 88 posts

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

#71

Post by cpeterso »

palish wrote: post #52
acavailhez wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have to bear one second of Youtube ads. (Thank you AdBlock!) The "Shark Week" ad that literally screamed at me at 11PM was the straw that broke my mental back. I immediately installed AdBlock.

Some video ads (on YouTube and elsewhere) can detect AdBlock and refuse to play the video.

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

#73

Post by qq66 »

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.

What do you mean "cornering the market"? You can always use Mapquest/Yahoo Maps/Bing Maps on your site.

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

#76

Post by mnutt »

pamelafox wrote: post #68
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.

Though that's how it may look, I don't think that was the strategy from the beginning. I worked as the support engineer for the Google Maps API starting in 2007, in the early days of the API. We didn't think about monetization then. But then the GFC happened, and all over Google, there was a bigger emphasis on monetization -- basically every product had to eventually monetize. We experimented with different types of…

Two interesting things in the open mapping space since the talk was published are TileMill:

http://mapbox.com/tilemill/

And Justin O'Bierne had some great blog posts on why Google Maps work so well from a usability perspective:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110130154705/http://www.41latit...

Sadly, he's taken down all of his posts.

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

#77

Post by mnutt »

easp wrote: post #48
fr0sty wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The price I was quoted was actually $17k/year for 250,000 impressions. We asked for clarification, and the salesperson said yes, you only get 250,000 impressions a year.

That's $68 cpm.

With some pushback they increased it to 1M impressions a year, but it's still a bit ridiculous.

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

#78

Post by rhizome »

shashashasha wrote: post #16
rorrr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the pricing is absolutely ridiculous. At least there are alternatives: 1) Yahoo maps 2) Bing maps 3) OpenStreetMap 4) Nokia Maps 5) Cloudmade

There's also (I'm as surprised as you are) Mapquest. They have a whole host of open APIs now, built on OSM, and even have web services like directions/elevation: http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/directions-s...

Except MapQuest is yucky.

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

#79

Post by tomkarlo »

rorrr wrote: post #13
aresant wrote: post #3

" - the "JavaScript API or the static maps API will be capped at 25,000 map loads per day. - They will be expected to pay a fee of $4 per thousand loads in excess of the limit. - The cap is set to 2,500 loads for styled maps that customize the presentation. - After 25,000 loads, the overage fee for styled maps will bump up to $8 per thousand. " That is no joke, a $4 - $8 CPM on map loads means your app has to be doin…

Yeah, the pricing is absolutely ridiculous. At least there are alternatives: 1) Yahoo maps 2) Bing maps 3) OpenStreetMap 4) Nokia Maps 5) Cloudmade

I believe Yahoo! is out of the maps API business as of September. http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/
Post reply on HN