Thats ok, there are plenty of other ways to get a free map and analytics on your homepage. And the added benefit of not handing your users data over to google. Planned for first thing after the vacation.

I&#x27;m pretty is a percent of the reason why they decided this absurd price increase.

The price increase was announced (and implemented) a few months ago.

No, the price hike was decided several months ago, see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoawesomeness.com&#x2F;developers-up-in-arms-over-google-maps-api-insane-price-hike&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoawesomeness.com&#x2F;developers-up-in-arms-over-google-...</a>

I wonder if this price hike has anything to do with the EU antitrust fine Google received recently.

There&#x27;s some other options too for people who want to use OSM data, but avoid deploying it themselves. One of the ones I discovered is that MapQuest (which it doesn&#x27;t look like they considered) offers OSM data and APIs as an option alongside the MapQuest proprietary data and APIs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mapquest.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;open&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.mapquest.com&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;open&#x2F;</a>And there&#x27;s several other places that offer this as well. So the advantage of building on OSM data and APIs potentially is that you could switch providers without losing API compatibility or having the data available change out from under you.

IIRC that&#x27;s for the openstreetmap.org site, which wasn&#x27;t built to answer queries from hundreds of commercial apps (like Maps API is). You&#x27;re supposed to copy and deploy the dataset on your own servers so you don&#x27;t burn bandwidth of the OSM project.

Openstreetmaps is not a tile provider. They to let you use their tile server for small scale stuff as far as I know, but if you want to use their data in a high volume you&#x27;ll have to either pay a tile provider that uses their data, or generate your own.

Are there any sites providing OpenStreetMap-as-a-Service? Something licenses and provided just like the Google Maps API, but using OSM?

I felt like the original article&#x27;s way of phrasing this is slightly misleading, maybe based on confusion on the author&#x27;s part. As other commenters here have made clear, OSM specifically intends to allow commercial and other downstream uses, but you have to host the tiles yourself or pay someone else to host them. That&#x27;s certainly different from other services and may involve much more up-front effort and infrastructure, but it absolutely intends to create a meaningful option for mapping tools that can be used in commercial sites.(Having said this, when I once had to do a one-off mapping project for a colleague, I found the OSM tools pretty daunting as a beginner, even though I appreciated how they&#x27;d reward effort with customizability and extensibility. I could certainly imagine that a lot of sites wouldn&#x27;t be prepared to set up this toolset, and I realize that OSM doesn&#x27;t provide a simple drop-in replacement for Google Maps that can be used by commercial sites.)

&gt; OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites.Not if I understand their terms correctly [1] [2]. Maybe there&#x27;s a distinction between the terms of the map data itself and the software published to interact with it?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;copyright" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;copyright</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opendatacommons.org&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;odbl&#x2F;summary&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opendatacommons.org&#x2F;licenses&#x2F;odbl&#x2F;summary&#x2F;</a>

Jacking up the price so far that it becomes prohibitive to actually use, on short notice, isn&#x27;t much different from shutting it down, is it? In both cases you suddenly can&#x27;t use the service anymore.

&gt; A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s bringing competition), but it tells me they&#x27;re thinking seriously about how to sustain&#x2F;develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.This is a bit of “thank you sir may I have another”. 10x price increases? It’s not sustainable? This is just a money grab - they’re not going to give a roadmap for how in the future google maps will be worth 10x the value - it seems to me more of a statement from Google that they have no real competition in the space.

&gt; A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s bringing competition), but it tells me they&#x27;re thinking seriously about how to sustain&#x2F;develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.It tells me they&#x27;re trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable. They raise prices rapidly to see how many people jump ship, and when your revenue begins to decline you&#x27;ve gone a bit too far.Of course, they&#x27;ve done it very quickly, so they&#x27;ve likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.

&gt;A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s bringing competition), but it tells me they&#x27;re thinking seriously about how to sustain&#x2F;develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.See this is the important thing. Sustainable. People and companies use these free services that take quite a bit of work to maintain and then when the company decides it needs to stop hemorrhaging money they start charging, often a fairly modest fee, and people lose their damn minds &quot;ermagerd, you&#x27;re evil, I need this, you can&#x27;t expect me to pay!&quot;. The simple fact that adding a price, or increasing the price, creates such an outrage is indicative, more oft than not, that it is a fair move because the service or good has obvious value to the user.People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I&#x27;m like &quot;erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it&#x27;s a tenth the price, shut up&quot;.&gt;When it comes to Google, I&#x27;m more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.I&#x27;ve been a Project Fi user for 2 and a half years now. This has been my worry every, single, day. Especially since they still owe me like 800$ in statement credits ha.

Re: &quot;When it comes to Google, I&#x27;m more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.&quot;Spot on. I would that if a site &#x2F; application is hitting Maps&#x27; paid tier they can (somehow) monitize that traffic and cover the cost.But monitization can&#x27;t help you if &#x2F; when they pull the plug.p.s. I sometimes wonder how often Google looks at Slack and regrets mothballing Wave.

This is why Google&#x27;s generic services should be commoditized as quickly as possible.

While I&#x27;ve experienced the frustration of having a formerly free service develop paid tiers (and policies that put me in those tiers), of all the changes a software service can make, this is the one that frustrates me the least, or at any rate less than:* shutting down the service entirely because the user base never grew into customers who actually valued the service* changing your terms of service to forbid an activity that was previously allowed, because someone discovered a use that messed up the price points and the service owners would rather forbid that than offer a reasonable price point allowing it* moving to opaquely metered service potentially with apparently arbitrary levels of financial exposure to the clientA big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s bringing competition), but it tells me they&#x27;re thinking seriously about how to sustain&#x2F;develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.When it comes to Google, I&#x27;m more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.

Something like a PaaS Price zombie <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11360262" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11360262</a>?

That&#x27;s a really neat idea! Maybe include alerting and the ability to &quot;follow&quot; services you use to monitor their prices?

This exists for Amazon products: camelcamelcamel.com

In Japan there is a site called kakaku.com which maintains graphs for historical prices. We used it to great effect when buying a combo washer and dryer.

I find a good site like every few years, but they always disappear. My guess is there is more (some) money in B2B.

Is there something like Amazon or Google shopping with a list of prices for all products through time? Kind of like the Wayback Machine (archive.org) but for products.Maybe having a searchable historical database of everything imaginable and their prices would keep companies honest and prevent price gouging.

On the other hand, if you are a business making real money, these price changes are no big deal. This happens all the time. Where some people see a sob story, I see a competitor getting stamped out.

Don&#x27;t Uber and Amazon do that already?

IANAL either, but yeah, the practice you&#x27;re describing, using revenues from other parts of a business to subsidize the areas it wants to compete hard in until the competitors are dead, is typically known as &quot;predatory pricing&quot;, which is illegal. IIRC, Standard Oil was a big user of that playbook.I don&#x27;t know if this qualifies, and I don&#x27;t know how much appetite there is for prosecuting Google for offering useful things for free. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;ve had much of a history of jacking up prices after killing off a market, until relatively recently. Interesting question, though.

I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that&#x27;d be pretty illegal.This is what drug dealers do.It was also the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

Walmart practically did this but with a little twist back in the days. They opened multiple extra stores within a very small geographical area. Some stores were actually losing money but it didn&#x27;t matter to them because they used it to completely destroy all competitors in that area and forced them to close up their shops. Once everybody is gone, Walmart has accomplished their mission and then proceeded to shut down the extra stores as well.

&gt;In the case of maps, there weren&#x27;t many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen&#x2F;profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings.ianal and all that, but isn&#x27;t somewhere antitrust- or monopoly- adjacent?I know if walmart moved into a new city and started giving away hardware for free, then waited until all the local hardware stores had been shut down for 10 months, and then jacked up their prices to 100 times what they used to be before going free, that&#x27;d be pretty illegal.

Almost every conversation I&#x27;ve had with someone working at a startup in this city inevitably turns to the &quot;so, are you worried Google will simply start offering your service for free?&quot;I remember like 3 or 4 years ago having this conversation at a hackathon with a bunch of &quot;Machine Learning&quot; &#x2F; &quot;Sentiment Analysis&quot; APIs present... right as google started offering both for free on their cloud platform.

&gt; In the case of maps, there weren&#x27;t many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen&#x2F;profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings.There was a related discussion[0] on HN a few weeks ago that I found enlightening. Commentator ucaetano&#x27;s phrasing of the strategy was &quot;create a desert of profitability around you&quot;. The discussion of moats vs deserts found here [1] is also useful.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17047348" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17047348</a> &quot;Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement&quot;[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17048492" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17048492</a>

In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick.Ah, the classic Oracle trick. Good to see the tradition is alive.

They&#x27;ve got easy to use exclusions that eliminate the cost if you don&#x27;t want the logs (and can be pretty picky about what to exclude, even to the point of doing percentage exclusions) and they announced it in advance and pushed the date back a few times.My issue is with devs that write software that spits out a couple of gigs an hour and refuse to trim it down or exclude things.

Diane Greene must be trying to build a profitable operation.

Google did something similar with Stackdriver logging, where they went from a generous free tier to an insanely expensive $.50&#x2F;Gb in roughly 2-3 months.Very annoying. Especially because by default every GCP service logs a bunch of crap to Stackdriver.Our log cost was going to be as high as our compute cost.

&gt; In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trickIt seems like they haven&#x27;t learned anything at all. Sure it was google that shafted them in this case, but the problem isn&#x27;t google, it&#x27;s that their business is entirely dependent on a third party who has the power to do this. They rejected the option that would have prevented this from happening in the future with another company.Oracle probably has a sales team on the way to their offices now.

But the other mapping services will very soon adjust their prices also. It makes no sense to be 10x cheaper than Google when 2x cheaper does the same.I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It&#x27;s named open, not free, so I guess providing your own server with osm data would work. Only with FreeStreetMap the data would be infected also.

The pricing change is understandably very frustrating for users of Google Maps who are affected, but it seems like a big win to me for everyone in the mapping market. Google is trading away a monopoly position (and related regulatory risk) in exchange for increased revenue so it&#x27;s a win for them. It&#x27;s a win for other mappers because now they can compete on price. It&#x27;s a win for users because they are getting more choice.

Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evilWhat do you mean it&#x27;s evil? People call Google evil for so many things that are hardly evil at all, that the word has lost its meaning in the context of Google. For example I honestly cannot tell if you&#x27;re calling them evil for increasing Maps pricing (thereby hurting maps-consuming startups) or for previously asking a low price (thereby hurting startups that offer maps).

That motto was removed some years ago: people using to too much to call them out.

Remember when Google once said “Don’t be evil” as their motto? Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil. But on the other hand, I think it is necessary, because at the end of the day Google is still a company that needs to make money and most importantly compete with each other, I’m really disappointed at Google to abuse their trust to hurt others.

The only alternative would be to develop everything in house and to purchase and run your own servers.

Google was subsidizing their startup. Makes sense that they have to pay at least something.

If you are relying on other services that heavily, it sounds like you didn&#x27;t have such a great business to start with

Re: &quot;...is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor...&quot;I was under the impression the trust for Google evaporated a long time ago. Sure, alternatives can be few at times. But anyone committed to and in bed with Google has to be sleeping with one eye open.

Having interacted with the Google Maps sales team, I would imagine these posts are a result of these companies hopping on a sales call expecting something ‘google’-like and are surprised that the Oracle sales team is on the call. The value extraction mentality was a bit surprising compared to the image the rest of google presents.

Why you cannot trust this model 101: because it&#x27;s practitioners understand the value of the labor&#x2F;product, 
capitalize on the OSS ideal and then push it to the unsuspecting.I don&#x27;t know how many bait and switch 
episodes from google I need to see but by 2008 I 
was done with them -- for the first time. 
Ad-nauseam.If you boycotted and didn&#x27;t use Google they would wither and die and stop being something to worry about: for immediate google specific free offerings that are sucker bait.
Also for self aggrandizing standards&#x2F;inclusions and buying 
the overt talent. But whatever. The HN community is full of dupes and buy ins, culture whores and fifth columnists. True belief in OSS died when everyone else took it and got rich.

&quot;Sudden change of policy by Google, which is directed specifically at startups (as smaller web sites should largely remain below even the new lower thresholds), is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor. In the future we would therefore keep our distance from Google Cloud and avoid deep integration with any Google services on which it can pull a similar trick. For example we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted.&quot;I think this is one of the most important points in the article - the way they handle these pricing changes destroys trust in Google&#x27;s other business offerings. How can people use Google products and services as a core piece of their infrastructure when they&#x27;re willing to bump their prices &gt;10x with only a few months of notice? That could literally be a business-ending event, depending on how core that service is to the business.In the case of maps, there weren&#x27;t many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen&#x2F;profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings. Fortunately, their last (sudden) price bump seems to have allowed the creation of some good alternatives.

This is actually my real question: can these companies afford it? If a company has X months of runway and their Maps costs just went up by a factor of 11 then Google may have just gone from &quot;less than payroll&quot; to &quot;more expensive than our devs&quot;.Is this Google trying to move into a new space?

I&#x27;m sure it is, but they can afford it...

Users at that scale typically have an enterprise plan which is handled differently (you have an account manager rather than using Google&#x27;s API console billing), and pricing is totally different.It&#x27;s been a while since I had a GMaps enterprise plan, though, so I&#x27;m not sure if they&#x27;re bumping the pricing on that side. At the time, the pricing was closer to the new prices they&#x27;re rolling out than they were to the old API console billing prices.

Apple hasn&#x27;t used Google Maps in years...

It&#x27;s imposed on every commercial user of their API which is why a lot of companies are also leaving Google Maps. I talked about this in another post, but Apple[1], Tesla[2], and Uber[3] are all getting off of Google Maps. It seems that Google raised prices to the point where it&#x27;s actually cheaper to just go and build your own maps or find a lower cost alternative.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...</a>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;tesla-map-navigation-open-source-platforms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;tesla-map-navigation-open-sou...</a>[3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;mapping-ubers-future&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uber.com&#x2F;newsroom&#x2F;mapping-ubers-future&#x2F;</a>

IIRC Google Maps via the iOS&#x2F;Android SDKs remain free, so theoretically the price increase does not apply to mobile-first X-sharing outfits like Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;Lime&#x2F;Bird&#x2F;etc.

Large customers always pay lower negotiated per-unit prices due to volume.

Is this price increase imposed on X-sharing outfits like Uber&#x2F;Lyft&#x2F;Lime&#x2F;Bird&#x2F;etc.?

Charging large partners like that makes sense, but the part that seems dumb is charging small businesses and startups at the same rate as behemoths like Uber.

Consider, for a moment, how much value a company like Uber gets from the Google Maps API.

You&#x27;re being downvoted, but it&#x27;s important that people read this comment. The vast majority of Google Maps users helpfully do everything Google asks of them, not realizing that they are contributing towards a monopoly that is definitely not free to use for anything other than personal use. Or might even find it fair that they can piggyback on other people&#x27;s paid usage (see also: Dropbox).

TIL there is a paid API for google maps, I just assumed it was free to use. Seems pretty nickel-and-dimey.

Totally. You also have business offering an API to OSM data that they mirror and host themselves.The limitation is for the openstreetmap.org website, that is not dimensioned to be heavily used.

&gt; Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls?Yes, plenty of people do that. Be careful &quot;OpenStreetMap API&quot; is only for editing. There is other software in the OSM ecosystem which has it&#x27;s own API (e.g. graphhopper has an API for routing). But sometimes people get confused and try to use the &quot;OSM [editing] API&quot; for all sorts of things.

Would it be possible to use a local copy of OpenStreetMap database, not paying for API calls?

It&#x27;s a good TL;DR of the article but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s intentional :)

This thread is precisely about that company

Pretty sure you linked to the same article that we&#x27;re discussing here.

&gt; They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month...How much of that $1300 is based on getting some freebies or low pices by staying below some usage threshold? Will they come upon additional costs on other services as they scale up?

Wow, people really do just read headlines nowadays...

There&#x27;s a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs.They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing).Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here&#x27;s the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (sic!):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;translate?sl=pl&amp;tl=en&amp;js=y&amp;prev=_t&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gdziepolek.pl%2Fblog%2Fpozegnanie-z-google-maps&amp;edit-text=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;translate.google.com&#x2F;translate?sl=pl&amp;tl=en&amp;js=y&amp;prev...</a>Looks like many folks who leeched on GM&#x27;s free plan will move to alternatives so maybe this dick move will turn around and became actually a good thing, would love to see more competition in the area and right now Google Maps is years ahead of competition: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justinobeirne.com&#x2F;google-maps-moat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justinobeirne.com&#x2F;google-maps-moat</a>

Any such middlemen would certainly be breaking the terms of their contract with google, and possibly copyright law.If they were willing and able to do so, they could already make a fortune by reselling Google Maps data.Since that does not happen, I have doubts regarding your scenario.

That would be true if the pricing were based on the business&#x27;s location, but not if the pricing were based on the map&#x27;s location.If you say that you&#x27;re in Khartoum when you&#x27;re actually in New York, you won&#x27;t get a very useful map back.

Yeah, if Google had differential pricing for something that costs them the same to produce, I&#x27;m sure you would soon find innovative middlemen who make it their business to source the Maps from lower cost priced countries to higher ones.Just like travel agents or passengers find ways to take cheaper flights from countries or city pairs that airlines price differently to help capture more market, even though it doesn&#x27;t cost them very different to provide the service.

&gt; why would you decrease exposure in a potential growth market?But is exposure really reduced? Google already has a free quota which is enough to bring plenty of exposure.

#2 seems shortsighted as a business model.Where your unit cost for a product is essentially negligible (amortized against other GM customers and GCP scale infrastructure), why would you decrease exposure in a potential growth market?The business answer is &quot;because offering discounts cannibalizes revenue from higher-margin markets.&quot; But in this case... you literally know exactly where the user is located.

&gt; Importantly, prices are the same from US to the Africa, despite the fact that revenue generation is vastly different in most developed countries compared to the others.This can be understood in two ways:1. Cost of serving is the same from US to Africa (datacenters, network bandwidth, engineering etc), so prices are same2. If #1 results in less adoption from developing countries, it is okay because they are not the focus anyway (i.e. SV companies are focussed on US&#x2F;EU markets first). So getting rid of non-revenue making chunk of traffic doesn&#x27;t hurt much.

How much does the developer account cost?

MapKit JS allows 250,000 instantiations and 25,000 service calls per day on the free tier. Currently you must have a paid developer account to use MapKit JS.Beyond that use this form to request an increase in your limit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;contact&#x2F;request&#x2F;mapkitjs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;contact&#x2F;request&#x2F;mapkitjs&#x2F;</a>As for pricing, nothing has been announced at this time.

This mentions Apple mapkit js. This is the first I’ve seen of that. Has anyone used it before?I’m wary of building anything on a proprietary JavaScript api, but if they provide tiles that can be used in leaflet or mapbox gl it might be an attractive option.

Okay. I&#x27;ve read that in a few places, but never anything that seemed quite clear and authoritative enough to really trust it. For instance Google&#x27;s docs [1] say:<pre><code> In addition to the $200 monthly free credit, all users get:
 
 Free Maps usage for iOS, Android, and Embed
 (for displaying maps only)
</code></pre>
But in a section about Dynamic Maps and Street View they also say:<pre><code> This change affects the following Google Maps Platform APIs:
 Maps JavaScript API, Maps Static API, Street View API, Maps
 SDK for Android, and Maps SDK for iOS.
</code></pre>
So are maps on Android only free if the user can&#x27;t interact with them?[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;maps-platform&#x2F;user-guide&#x2F;pricing-changes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;maps-platform&#x2F;user-guide&#x2F;pricing-ch...</a>

Displaying maps on Android remains free... so I guess people are doing nothing?

I have a native Android app I need to update before Thanksgiving. Right now the map uses Google Play Services. I&#x27;ve done fairly deep OpenStreetMap projects on several websites, but with Android I&#x27;m afraid what it will mean to find a Google alternative. What are other people doing there?

Nope. Pretty sure usage through the SDK remains free

does anyone know if this development will affect users of MapKit that hosts Google Maps within an iOS app? I&#x27;ve been using Google Maps through this SDK for over a year and haven&#x27;t heard anything about them charging for the service or being able to track usage as one scales.

I&#x27;ve tried using Bing Maps for clients and they always complain and want Google. Maybe with the pricing increases that will begin to change. Google Maps lacks any real competition. Sure there&#x27;s Here, and Apple Maps, and Bing...but none of them are -serious- competitors.

Bing maps does not publish pricing info AFAIK. Last time I checked it said contact sales, no price was given.

It&#x27;s strange they haven&#x27;t tried Bing Maps (differnt than Azure maps), it has a much rich web control and support for Javascript which per the article was one of the selection criteria.

Thanks! The quality is great but I need around 250k 512x512 satellite tile loads per day so 250k &#x2F; (4 tiles per “view”) * (30 days per month) - (50k free requests per month) * ($0.50 per 1000 views) = $912.50 per month. Is my understanding correct?

Hi Zylepe! Disclosure, I work at Mapbox, but wanted to point you towards our Satellite Streets tiles which combine many different data sources (including DG), but also contain high-resolution flyover imagery in larger urban areas in the USA. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapbox.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;satellite&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapbox.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;satellite&#x2F;</a>What did you use to calculate your $1k price&#x2F;month estimate for your website?

This talks mostly about road map tiles. Has anyone found any good options for satellite image tiles? Mapbox resells DigitalGlobe imagery but would cost over $1k&#x2F;month for my site so I’m looking for an alternative with more attractive pricing options

Photon is the most popular autocomplete solution. Runs fine on an SSD and there are pre-built database dumps you can download. Obviously OSM&#x27;s address coverage isn&#x27;t great, which is always going to be the limitation.

I had very good luck with graphhopper for routing. On digitalocean it costs about $10 to process planet.osm and the server can run on as small as a $40&#x2F;month droplet.I am having trouble finding a good autocomplete&#x2F;geo search solution though, curious if anyone has found a decent quality provider or solution you can self host like graphhopper.

I&#x27;d think you can cache results of geocoding either direction as their results should hardly change. Not sure of the usage model but if it involves repeated look ups, this should be OK if it doesn&#x27;t break any terms.

&gt; and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if)Same for Google Maps: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lucb1e&#x2F;status&#x2F;522491538912604160" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lucb1e&#x2F;status&#x2F;522491538912604160</a>Most of us here are from reasonably rich countries, and here Google is always fine, while OSM is usually fine (but not always). I am curious if you compare a few hundred random populated places on earth, how they compare. Where it is not economical to create a map, as in the tweet above, Google Maps is terrible. OSM is more often terrible in a country where they have just enough money to be worth it to Google, but where OSM just didn&#x27;t happen to catch on among local mappers. You only need a few dozen for a country of a few million.The Netherlands is truly the best country on OSM that I know of: 100% road and address coverage, and there are always people who love to jump on new things like a new bridge or tunnel. Somehow almost all the cyclepaths, trails, etc. are also on there.Turns out, a grand total of 65 monthly active users maintain it.I was very surprised. Apparently it doesn&#x27;t take that much to maintain the map. If we get a few hundred people to work on OSM once a month in a given country of average size, it seems that you can maintain a map of a quality higher than Google Maps, at a tiny fraction of the cost (look at the expenses of the OSM Foundation), while being objective and free for everyone (scientists, businesses, consumers) to use.

It&#x27;s not hard to produce your own tiles from OpenStreetMap data and serve them from your own server using something as Leaflet. If you only need to show maps, and if OSM data is good enough in your part of the world (a big if), this is the way to go.What is very hard is coming up for a replacement of either geocoding&#x2F;reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don&#x27;t really work or are quite difficult to setup (IMHO).Best of luck!

It definitely took a decent amount of work (and a double decent amount of testing).As voltagex_ mentioned, most location providers have a different API flow than Google Maps - rather than doing a total abstraction of providers (which would take too much effort), we went for a Google flow and non-Google flow basically.For example, location autocomplete with Google requires a two step process (call for suggestions, then call for details of the suggestion) where a couple alternative apis provided the necessary data in the suggestion process. This requires a bit of a different flow on the server&#x2F;client, so building support for both in was one of the hurdles we had to get over.As for other takeaways, I guess mainly always have a backup plan for mission-critical service providers :)

Any details on how complicated enabling that switchability was? Or details &#x2F; costs &#x2F; takeaways from your process?Seems like now would be a great time to write a blog post on how you did it. :)

No need to write it yourself - the article mentions using Leaflet <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leafletjs.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leafletjs.com&#x2F;</a> for just such a purpose.

Writing a mapping abstraction layer is tricky - mostly because Google Maps does things differently than other providers. Can you share any details?

I would be interested in the details on this as well, as we heavily use mapping, routing&#x2F;directions, autocomplete.

&gt; I&#x27;m finding it really odd Google would just fuck their customers over this way.Why is it odd?If you&#x27;re on a free tier, you&#x27;re not really a &#x27;customer&#x27;, just a user.If you&#x27;re a &#x27;startup&#x27; you probably have funding. If not, you&#x27;re not the sort of &#x27;startup&#x27; that will fit in their calculations.

I&#x27;m curious about how the conversations between Google and customers went about this change.I&#x27;m finding it really odd Google would just fuck their customers over this way. They must have known how it affects startups in particular. What were the conversations with Google like?Just one-sided &quot;This is the new price, take it or leave it!&quot;? Or something else?

I work for a startup that has mapping&#x2F;routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google&#x27;s mapping APIs was too great and decided to work on having a switchable backup provider in case something like this should ever happen.With auto complete especially, we would have had a 10-20x increase in pricing (and this is with an &#x27;enterprise&#x27; plan pricing). As the article says, we were basically given 2 months notice for an enormous price hike that would likely render the business untenable. Luckily we were able to put our backup plan into action, but changes like this really erode the confidence to use Google (at least for mapping) in the future unfortunately.

A 20x jump on the monthly charge, especially in lower margin business, will hurt whichever way you look at it, IMHO.

If you&#x27;re a consumer business with low margins but very high scale, this is a killer. Before, you could be providing value to a lot of people at a low price point (or free&#x2F;ad supported). This makes ad-supported much, much harder.

Name one business that can absorb a 20x increase in a component cost.

I know 1st world companies with millions of dollars in revenue who quickly switched away from Google Maps, at some expense, to alternate map providers after Google hiked up its prices for Premium customers a few years ago.There where so many &quot;why should we pay&#x2F;develop X, Google does it for free&quot; conversations at one of my previous employers who competes in the mapping space with Google.

If you get into trouble with your unit economics given such a raise, then you really need to think about your business model. How much value is your business really creating ON TOP of the maps?I don&#x27;t want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don&#x27;t think enough about this issue of value creation.

The thing is Google Maps is not a monopoly. There are plenty of other map providers, so a price increase is not anti competitive, because you can switch to other providers.

If your country has any kind of antitrust or competition regulator then please file a complaint against Google.

In our own experience, we pleaded the fact that those dollar figures are just beyond workable if you consider the fact that we come from a developing country and we&#x27;re faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).

You&#x27;re right about the Street View feature that is currently a true key diferenciator that has not a lot of competition in terms of availability and coverage.Though, Mapillary is quite interesting but their pricing model is not really comparable to Google&#x27;s one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapillary.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mapillary.com&#x2F;pricing</a>

The standard license prohibits use in autonomous vehicles. Para 2.e <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.google.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;terms_maps.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maps.google.com&#x2F;help&#x2F;terms_maps.html</a>

I think there is a different reason for charging for StreetView. The need to make their money back and quick. Self driving cars will have cameras that will give reasonable results for a lot of use cases (maybe not 360 but who cares). It is also a potential combo monetization strategy for the autonomous vendor.

If they were concerned about abuse from free tiers, there&#x27;s much better ways to handle it than this. It&#x27;s Google we&#x27;re talking about.Also, it&#x27;s a lame excuse because this affects paid users such as yourself who have nothing to do with the abuse.In Google&#x27;s defense, a hobby project wouldn&#x27;t need 750k requests a month. At that point it&#x27;s more than a hobby. But, the 28k limit is low.

Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren&#x27;t very good. There&#x27;s a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn&#x27;t want to take.Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn&#x27;t as good as the market leader. That&#x27;s not predatory.

The link to make a complain would be the antitrust division here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;report-violations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;report-violations</a>

&gt;They seemed to buy into my reasoningWe&#x27;re going to need a bit more detail from an account that clearly has an agenda.

Please contact the US Department of Justice and let them know about how the price increase is affecting you in regards to Street View. They seemed to buy into my reasoning that Google has effectively made sure that they won&#x27;t have any Street View competition by artificially keeping prices low for years. The more people that complain, the sooner the DOJ will probably take action. For European users I recommend complaining to your regulators as well, especially using Street View as your main complaint since there&#x27;s no real alternatives.

If you read the original article, it gives you the impression that it&#x27;s tiles only. But as you point out it&#x27;s a lot of different parts of the Maps service going up by usually an order of magnitude at least.I run a geocoding service for Australia specifically (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocodeplus.com.au" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocodeplus.com.au</a>) and a lot of people I talk to are completely unaware that they&#x27;re going to see a x10 change in what their forward&#x2F;reverse geocoding is going to cost them.

It&#x27;s as much as a 28x increase in price. For Street View imagery, the cost has gone from $0.5 per 1000 views to $14 &#x2F; 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative.I&#x27;m seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 &#x2F; month to around $30,000 &#x2F; month.Their rationale is essentially that they did not want commercial users abusing their free tier. Before this change, they had been reaching out to such entities individually, offering their &#x27;premium plan&#x27; service.The pricing for the (old) premium plan was remarkably similar to the new pricing which now applies to everyone.This pricing change has ended the era of Google Maps mashups &#x2F; hobby projects.

A lot of people forget that Mapbox did a similar move with their $499&#x2F;mo price hike for commercial apps + pay as you go. Then later they simply switched all of their old users to the new pricing.Not to mention when I called to ask about Enterprise pricing years ago, it was $7,500&#x2F;yr. 9 months later it became $25,000&#x2F;yr.I have no trust in neither Google Maps nor Mapbox.

We used to use Skobbler, which was great until they basically stopped working and went silent.
For the past 18 months, we&#x27;ve used Thunderforest (it&#x27;s an OpenStreetMap PaaS) and they&#x27;re great. Solid uptime, good maps and the pricing is amazingly good. Andy - the guy who runs it - is super helpful and can also put together custom map styles (which we&#x27;ve taken up).

I&#x27;m not really a fan of GDPR actually. I think advertising has its place, and the more targeted it is, the better the results for everyone. The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook, which is more of a problem with America&#x27;s campaign financing (non)restrictions than anything (and probably the fact that the candidate who used it was quite anti-establishment).What the internet is missing though is an alternate funding mechanism. When I visit a site I indirectly give the owner something like $0.002 (0.2 cents) worth of bucks from advertisers who show things to me. Why can&#x27;t I just pay the website that as a microtransaction directly? Transaction fees would eat it all - but aggregated enough, and perhaps as part of a $10&#x2F;month &#x27;internet content subscription&#x27;, it could work in the way that Spotify does.

I&#x27;m just as in favor of GDPR as you, but I shall reserve my cheers for when the first actual GPDR fines are handed out. For now, I&#x27;m mostly seeing annoyed SMEs on one side who go to ridiculous lengths to be compliant in the face of missing precedents.And on the other side, big internet corps are implementing joke consent pages with tons of dark patterns that clearly go against the spirit of the regulation. I think they&#x27;re pretty certain that they will eventually be fined, but they&#x27;ve done the math and found that milking customer data for the X years until the first fines are imposed is more profitable than complying now and not risking a fine.

It will likely effect Google more than anyone else. Microsoft and Amazon generally don&#x27;t make (much) money from data collection. So as far as cloud providers, those two should be safe.

I think the GDPR and EU fine is going to trigger Google - and perhaps other large American tech companies - to actually start charging for services, now that our personal data cannot be so easily sold. Google has been enjoying huge profits, so is probably setting the pricing on those services at the level required to maintain those profits.I think what we will see in the maps arena is multiple-country specific maps sites popping up, like a map site specific to Poland for example. Physical businesses will then have a real hassle making sure they have a presence on ~10 different mapping sites, instead of just Google Maps.Ironically it will make getting around Europe more difficult. I have lived in Poland and there are a lot of business absent from Google Maps, and a lot of cities not present on Google Maps transit.

&gt; When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it.Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005? There may have been (and you seem so certain I&#x27;m sure you could name them all :P), but it&#x27;s crazy to claim that there aren&#x27;t far more competitors in the last 5 years than there were back then. Just look at the article, which is literally about all the competition available.

Doesn&#x27;t every tech company pretty much start free then start charging once they get all the users?

A couple of years ago in my home country, in Eastern Europe, we had a startup focused on street view imagery. They managed to go through all the major cities and roads and had way better data than google and more coverage. They also started expanding in other countries in the region, going from Austria to Poland. There was a catch, they were more expensive and you couldn’t use their services for free, because they actually needed to make money. The moment Google came in and added street view for this Area of Europe, and even though their product had better images than Google, they went out of business, because nobody used their service any more.

What was the competition that was run out of business?

Here is the problem. When Google first launched Maps it was free and they ran all of the other competition out of business. Now that all their competition are dead they want to charge for it. If that doesn&#x27;t scream antitrust I don&#x27;t know what else does. Google has grown maps using pretty shady tactics. Their data is only so good due to mining data from all the Android users and I bet Street View has a lot of government money behind it.

&gt; On top of that people finally receive proper support from google once significant sums are involved.Will they? If my company is now paying $2k&#x2F;month (where before it was under a free tier) am I really any more likely to get &#x27;proper support&#x27; from google? $2k&#x2F;month is not even a rounding error on a rounding error for google, and will be even less so if all the other users are also paying $2k&#x2F;month as well.It would be nice to think that, and I&#x27;ll change my tune when I see it, but even after working with people who were paying for google cloud platform, I didn&#x27;t think they we got terribly good support.

I think it is positive that google finally reaches a sane price point with maps. As the comparison in the blog post shows, the whole market of map providers looked at what gmaps is charging and kind of went along with a price in the same category.The higher price allows them to actually get paid for the value they provide to various startups, which - as they pointed out in the blog post - would not exist without these maps.Of course, the open source approach of OSM with mostly unpaid volunteers is again able to show its potential.Everyone agrees gmaps has the best data imagery, plus street view - so why not make people pay for it accordingly. I really don&#x27;t see a problem with this. On top of that people finally receive proper support from google once significant sums are involved.

Yes, I already made modifications on it. As far as I can tell openstreetmap is the only map that successfully finds the location of my address.

Try openstreetmap.org, there user contributions are always welcome :)

Google really needs to stop treating their customers and users so badly.Slightly offtopic: I have been trying to get Google to fix the location of my flat on Maps for years now. I have reported it multiple times to them and it is still unfixed. Does anyone know a more direct way I can get in touch with them?

And for OpenStreetMap, the cost might be negligible depending on how often you want updates and how large an area you want to cover: for a small area, you can generate tiles once a year or so and just have static hosting serve them up.According to another comment in this thread who hosts a tile server him&#x2F;herself on DigitalOcean, that costs about $40. Doesn&#x27;t seem terrible even for a startup, either.

&gt;Doesn&#x27;t Apple&#x27;s map require a developer account which costs money?$100 seems like a bargain compared to those other options.

Doesn&#x27;t Apple&#x27;s map require a developer account which costs money? I haven&#x27;t used them, but I seem to remember you have to pay to develop using Apple products.

Apple&#x27;s web mapping free tier is huge:<pre><code> Apple
 250K map views &#x2F; *day*

 Mapbox
 50K map views &#x2F; month

 Google ($200 credit buys you)
 28k dynamic map views &#x2F; month
</code></pre>
Once it comes out of beta, I&#x27;m guessing their pricing will be pretty aggressive too.

I wonder when we realize that, whoever the current big guy is, having a single company be the big guy means they can pull this kind of crap. There are two ways to avoid this: have multiple good options at any given time (and make it easy to switch), or have a non-commercial entity be the main source of data. My inner hacker wants the latter, but I guess either would be okay.

Wonder if a company like Garmin will be jumping into the market given Google&#x27;s behavior.

Tile generation wasn&#x27;t THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using &quot;render_list_geo.pl&quot;). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles.Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.

The fastest way, if you don&#x27;t have resources and don&#x27;t mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1].The download is an SQLite database with a standard-ish structure (MBTiles), you can either write a small server or use theirs.I needed vector tiles in other projections — WGS84 equirectangualar, an Arctic one, and an Antarctic one. Generating those took many hours on a cluster.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openmaptiles.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;planet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openmaptiles.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;planet&#x2F;</a>

Would it be possible to put Free map tiles in something like DAT or IPFS, to share the load? Kind of like Peertube, but for maps.

I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources. Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn&#x27;t be that resource intensive.I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;switch2osm.org&#x2F;manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;switch2osm.org&#x2F;manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04...</a> (yes they are for Ubuntu but you&#x27;ll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don&#x27;t really need it, I recommend trying it to understand how it works; it has some very intuitive ideas.Beyond the tile server I am also proposing GeoServer (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoserver.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geoserver.org</a>) for hosting the geo points on the maps (it can integrate with PostGIS and various other datasources and output the geo points in various different formats). You can then use Leaflet (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leafletjs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;leafletjs.com</a>) to actually display the map and points!

How does Mapbox stack up against what we&#x27;ve built? Well, they have way more people working on the problem, so there&#x27;s going to be more support and more eyes on the problem. I didn&#x27;t directly compare map tiles, that was a couple other people on my team. We decided to try moving forward with our own OSM-based tiles, so the conclusion I&#x27;ve come to is that it compares favorably.How difficult would it be to build a competitor to Mapbox? Well, if all you care about are map tiles, it&#x27;s no big deal. If you want to build a business around it, that&#x27;s always work. You&#x27;re going to need to build the tiles, have infrastructure to serve it, monitoring, staff to manage it, billing and charging infrastructure, etc...

How does Mapbox stack up against what you&#x27;ve built? Does Mapbox provide any advantages or is are the two not very comparable? How difficult would it be to spin up a Mapbox competitor?

Uh, while I upvote OSM comments a lot because I often think they are good comments, blindly upvoting based on positive mentions of OSM does not contribute to the conversation...

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.This is the platform Maps.me is based on, correct? I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I&#x27;ve attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations.I too want Google&#x2F;Apple maps alternatives to succeed, but my limited trial so far has not been promising.

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.

We found some references saying that each box could probably handle around 10,000 map tiles per second.    Our full tileset is under 30GB, so it is easily cached.  One of our machines can generate Tiles at a rate of 2,500&#x2F;sec, another is 1,300.

Thanks for the docker image pointers; just what I was looking form.  What kind of traffic volume can you handle on what size VM&#x27;s?

* How is the workflow for updating OSM data with this project?* What is the recommended procedure for backup + restore?I find a lot of projects in this space make you go through an manual copy-paste setup process like if it was a one-time thing - it is not - updating OSM data is a crucial part in this process and should be part of it.

You can also prerender the tiles on a powerful machine and host them on a cheap instance (assuming you don&#x27;t need very large regions). A while ago I created an OSM server (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seemk&#x2F;TileSweep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seemk&#x2F;TileSweep</a>) to do this for me, you can select regions you want to render via a polygon and you get a SQLite database of the tiles. It can also run as an alternative for mod_tile + renderd.I rendered all of Estonia from zoom levels 0 to 18 (~16.5M tiles) which is around 20GB and host the tiles on a cheap DigitalOcean instance.

From the article (emphasis added):&quot;Which maps should we investigate deeper?Some options we could reject quickly for various reasons. OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Apple Maps, even though we wouldn&#x27;t mind having Apple logo on our site somewhere, was just released as beta and requires Apple developer account to test properly.&quot;

It seems like they rejected OSM because they couldn&#x27;t directly use the OSM site to serve tiles, but would instead need to host their own infrastructure for it.  I understand that, but for us we decided to go ahead and own it.

I was wondering too why they skipped OpenStreetMap so quickly.Living in Germany, I find the map quality of OSM much better than Google Maps. Sure, it lacks the integration with the other Google services like a good search and live traffic, but speaking about the pure map quality, Google is lacking a lot of detail here.

I answered your questions where you asked it elsewhere in this thread.

Updating is easy, the tooling built around OSM takes care of all of it.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nominatim" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.openstreetmap.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nominatim</a> is an OK geocoder, definitely worth trying out at least. Though the pay services will definitely be better.

Thank you very much, may I ask two questions:<pre><code> * what is the workflow to update the OSM data?
 * what is your recommendation for a good geocoder?</code></pre>

I&#x27;m just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built the next night after tuning some CartoCSS for our needs.We already have our own aerial tiles, built off the free NAIP imagery, and I just went through rebuilding the 2017 NAIP tiles last week to make them higher quality and fix some seam issues.This combination is pretty good and lets us take control of our map tile destiny.References I used in setting things up:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zavpyj&#x2F;osm-tiles-docker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;zavpyj&#x2F;osm-tiles-docker</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;switch2osm.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;switch2osm.org&#x2F;</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ircama.github.io&#x2F;osm-carto-tutorials&#x2F;tile-server-ubuntu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ircama.github.io&#x2F;osm-carto-tutorials&#x2F;tile-server-ubu...</a>

And the squeeze to shore up revenue continues. It does really hurt to have your business tied to someone else&#x27;s api. This will continue to damage startups as the big companies deal with eroding search revenue

They&#x27;re under something like a non-commercial license.Three parts of a map are copyrightable.The map data is © OpenStreetMap under their open license, but OpenMapTiles claim copyright on the cartography of their tiles — since they aren&#x27;t an exact copy of OSM, they decide what to filter for each zoom level, what to simplify for performance and so on.Additionally, if you choose to use it, a map style is copyright: the design of showing motorways in blue at 4px and cycle paths in green, for example.For the tiles you see on OpenStreetMap.org, all three parts are under open licenses. (And there are decisions at all three levels, for example OSM&#x27;s database contains the water features you see at OpenSeaMap.org, but doesn&#x27;t render them.)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openmaptiles.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openmaptiles.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;</a>

The data is open and can be downloaded from the donation-run OpenStreetMap Foundation, and as long as you provide credits you are free to do anything with the data (commercial or otherwise), but if someone makes a custom style and creates tiles (images) from them, then those images are copyrighted.

Interesting, you had to purchase a license for the tiles? I thought that OpenMapTiles were &quot;open&quot;.

We switched from Google Maps to OpenMapTiles for the same reason. Running OpenMapTiles via Docker was pretty easy. We bought a license for the Tiles (Europe) and it was a one time fee only.

One zoom level in from that it shows the names of all the major roads, glorious. With google maps it seems you sometimes have to zoom right in to where a road is half the screen to see the names. I switch to OsmAnd on my phone for exactly this reason.

I prefer the old style of Google Maps, when roads were marked more clearly. I used MOBAC to get offline cached tiles and use them with Galileo on my iPhone and my own map app on my laptop.There&#x27;s a theme called OSM Bright that looks good, and when I figure out how to set it up, I plan to switch.

I could navigate the city with a map printed even at that zoom level, but good luck trying to do that with google maps.That&#x27;s the single most important point for the map.I didn&#x27;t consciously try to compare the maps before, but looking at the differences now, google maps seem thoughtless and completely random at what is highlighted, how parts of the city are named (some use names, some numbers, for no reason), what parts are shown and what are not.

I don&#x27;t use hidpi, so I can&#x27;t really compare your screenshots. :) Mapy.cz just looks better on your screenshot to me (aside from blur caused by rendering a screenshot vs direct software rendering optimized for my LCD).

&gt; You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better.mapy.cz indeed has more data but visually, Google IMO looks better on my Windows PC. Maybe it’s high DPI support, maybe it’s font rendering, but small labels are barely readable in mapy.cz, compare the screenshots yourself: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;const.me&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;maps&#x2F;mapy.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;const.me&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;maps&#x2F;mapy.png</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;const.me&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;maps&#x2F;gm.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;const.me&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;maps&#x2F;gm.png</a>
BTW, Microsoft did even better: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;const.me&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;maps&#x2F;ms.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;const.me&#x2F;tmp&#x2F;maps&#x2F;ms.png</a>

Actually putting the huge label in the middle just wastes space for anyone looking at the map regularly, or for printing. You already know what you&#x27;re looking at at this zoom level, or can zoom out.Google maps does terrible job by missing labels for half of the city parts.

I disagree that the competitor is anywhere better for the links you just posted.Not only does the mapy.cz version look terribly blurry compared to Google Maps, it doesn&#x27;t do nearly as good of a job putting interesting waypoints in the right location (e.g. the label for &quot;Prague&quot; or the river name going along the river).

Personally, google maps is a clear-cut winner for me your example. Google maps is easier to look at and has much better information hierarchy.

I like this too. I just like white countoured roads&#x2F;streets I guess. :) Mapy.cz also have offline versions (for the whole europe that is!).Seems like there are several good local competitors to google maps.

Pretty good, but check this out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2gis.ru&#x2F;moscow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2gis.ru&#x2F;moscow</a>Buildings are actually 3d at closer zoom levels.You can click on a building to see the list of all businesses in that building.Bus routes can be shown when clicking on a route number.The best part, it works completely offline as a phone&#x2F;desktop app.

I agree that&#x27;s it&#x27;s much more map-like. You&#x27;re not looking at a map to rest your eyes with gray mess.They also have an API that&#x27;s completely free also for commercial purposes (and they have coverage for Poland)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.mapy.cz" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.mapy.cz</a>

Google&#x27;s &quot;satelite view&quot; is really a 3D view. You should compare that with &quot;3D&quot; on mapy.cz, not with aerial imagery.It looks comparable with 3D view on mapy.cz.

&gt; Much more contrast.I have to say the satellite imagery on Mapy.cz lacks sharpness in comparison to Google Maps&#x27; satellite view. Google&#x27;s view actually looks over-processed, which I think would lend it greater acuity when zoomed out. They look like they hold a comparable level of detail, just Mapy.cz could use a photoshop massage.Also, Google Maps seems to have, at least from the small area I&#x27;m zoomed in at from your links, better location labels. ie: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;yUOlWO0.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;yUOlWO0.jpg</a>The non-satellite view I do like better on Mapy.cz, though -- it looks significantly more readable as far as structures and streets go, at every zoom level. More useful, maybe, more like a map ought to be.

Exactly. Specifically, for biking or hiking, Google Maps are useless. Mapy.cz can be downloaded (in region chunks) for offline use and are generally a pleasure to use.

&gt; Google Maps is objectively the best product on its market, in many regards positioned light years ahead of its competitors.No. Google maps is an absolute, washed out turd style wise. We have much better local competitor.Compare this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@50.081478,14.4272906,13z" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;@50.081478,14.4272906,13z</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapy.cz&#x2F;zakladni?x=14.4068130&amp;y=50.0892746&amp;z=13" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mapy.cz&#x2F;zakladni?x=14.4068130&amp;y=50.0892746&amp;z=13</a>You can try various zoom levels, and mapy.cz is always better. Much more detail. Much more contrast. Much more visual information. Tourist version of the maps.I hated using Google maps when traveling in Spain. Sadly they are the recommended way to get public transport info. But I avoid them at all costs. I sometimes print maps when travelling and I can imagine google maps style would be more than useless when printed B&#x2F;W on a shitty printer, while I could still use mapy.cz maps while low on ink.

Seems like there is a good chance that all of the Google Maps competitors will raise their prices now too (although probably not as substantially), so it doesn&#x27;t seem like a fair price comparison until all of the dust settles there. They all probably set their price ranges to be inline with Google Maps since that is the most popular product and there are very few reasons why a potential customer would go with a non-Google Maps product if it was more expensive than Google Maps.

I&#x27;m an employee. It&#x27;s not my product. I didn&#x27;t include a link because I thought it would be too spammy. It&#x27;s tallygo.com.At this time, we are a mix of mapbox + our own data.I don&#x27;t know why you need to sign up to see sample code. I&#x27;ll give that feedback.For mapping you&#x27;d use it over mapbox because it comes for free with your navigation package. For navigation you&#x27;d use it over mapbox because it has better turn-by-turn instructions, routes and traffic estimates.The map is accurate throughout the world. The navigation product is specific to North America at this time, but it will expand.

If you&#x27;re going to promote your product you should probably have a link in your comment.Few things:* Who&#x27;s your mapping provider?* Why do I need to sign up to even see example code?* Why would I use this over something like MapBox?* What&#x27;s your accuracy like in Australia?

TallyGo employee here. We have free map impressions for customers of our navigation SDK.

This price change doesn&#x27;t make any sense to me or the people where I work, unless they just want people to stop using Google Maps on other sites.You increase prices over an order of magnitude. You give people warning. You give people credits to cover a few more months without paying extra.What is the end game. If you just want extra revenue, why are you giving them the grace period to switch? Why are you giving service credits to give people another couple months to switch?So if they want people to stop using Google Maps (businesses, not consumers), WHY do they want reduced use? Is there an outside source changing pricing or licensing? I don&#x27;t think so, I think Google owns the data.

From the screenshot, it looks like they offer inventory&#x2F;pricing for the drug you care about.

I&#x27;m kind of unclear on what value they add above just using Google Maps to find a pharmacy?If all they do is repackage Google&#x27;s data then I don&#x27;t see Google as being particularly evil in this case, why should they give &quot;the competition&quot; a free ride?I have to guess they do add something (inventory data maybe?) to make it worthy of going to their website though.

I just got done on the first stages of a maps instant answer for Jive Search using Mapbox and think it&#x27;s coming along very well. Still have a lot to do in terms of adding directions and triggering the answer with the name of a city, etc but am quite happy with being able to switch from a map view to satellite view easily. Didn&#x27;t take long to get up and running either. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jivesearch&#x2F;jivesearch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jivesearch&#x2F;jivesearch</a>

Hmm… where have I heard this idea recently? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;06&#x2F;29&#x2F;apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...</a>

I think their navigation offering is another strong moat in terms of just plain old maps.I&#x27;m sure Google is mining all of that sweet, sweet GPS data from people using their navigation. I can imagine some machine learning of aeriel imagery and some sort of GPS path clustering helps them get a lot of the last mile.Navigation also helps them get real time traffic data and allows them to learn how costly certain road segments are.

Look into OpenStreetCam: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstreetcam.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstreetcam.org&#x2F;</a>

Google Maps strength is largely due in part to their surveying of roads with those funky looking vehicles I think most of us have seen. If one were to develop an app that could use anyone&#x27;s GPS to do the same as what Google is paying money for... it could pose a real threat to them. A &quot;crowdsourced&quot; map of sorts..

Leaflet is the open source base&#x2F;core version of mapbox-gl-js; they&#x27;re both maintained by Mapbox people.

For the client library, it&#x27;s interesting that they are bullish on leaflet rather than mapbox-gl-js. After playing with their respective demos, I found that the latter seems much smoother and prettier.

You could always use Leaflet or even d3.geo (or cesium or whatever) and just buy whatever tiles and data you need from the many providers who offer them. You would only need to buy for the areas you service and could buy new tiles annually or when you expand into new areas, just like you do with your car&#x27;s GPS. You can buy rasters and vector data from so many providers, and actually get a lot higher quality data than Google in some cases (for some areas). This also affords you complete control over the map style, although some providers like Mapbox allow you a lot of control over look and feel via their StyleJSON stuff.Also if it really is such a big part of your product, I don&#x27;t really think $80 per day (for 15k unique users) as an operational cost is all that much honestly. And if you have a single page app, Google only charges for the first load anyways. They may have greatly increased the prices, but it does reflect the value they are providing and the tone taken in the article comes off as freeloading and ignorant of the effort level and value of providing such a service.People also need to note that Google&#x27;s javascript framework and embeddable maps is a different product than their maps.google.com, which seems to be higher quality both in the data and the rendering&#x2F;features. The one they offer to embed on your site appears to be a much older version (for instance it doesn&#x27;t support smooth zooming or 512x512 tiles). There are also TOS restrictions with what you can do with their javascript framework and widgets&#x2F;API&#x27;s, for instance you generally can&#x27;t use other data providers or features from other mapping&#x2F;GIS services on the same page.

A big +1 on this one.  In a previous role, my organization leveraged google maps enterprise for tons of money, and the support sucked something awful.

Having used&#x2F;managed&#x2F;dealt Google Maps enterprise product, I can say, it alone has made me _hate_ and not trust Google. These price hikes are laughable...Support forums&#x2F;forms are buried deep and inaccessible via Google search (or were), and for technical support you&#x27;re required to use some obscure login to contact someone. People may or may not reply to you in at timely manner, and sales reps don&#x27;t give a shit about you the second you sign the paper.Problems with their APIs or errors are impossible to get priority for... so you basically pony up many thousands of dollars and you get a product you have to support yourself. Not to mention back in the day the Google Maps JS had a memory leak (we had to write our own pinning layer).... I will note, I&#x27;ve noticed Google Cloud seems to be better managed with actual semblance of support but it&#x27;s the only one I&#x27;ve had a good experience with.I recommend Google&#x27;s services to no one because the support is so abysmal and now the price is too (at least for maps).

Just as a n00b who thought the fact that I could make these silly custom maps &quot;OMG look the pins are silly things now!&quot; on Google Maps was super cool... I&#x27;m disappointed.I get that anything I do on my own is likely below the threshold.... but at the same time I feel like this likely will somewhat reduce maps usage and what if any bragging rights I might have with an employer (if I can find one ;)).For me I maybe wonder if I&#x27;m going to make a hobby app that I should look at alternatives instead, or just quit dorking with Google Maps in my spare time...Granted this is all very individual light stuff, but I wonder if it is a consideration people will have considering how dramatic and sudden the price change has been.

Farewell, Google Maps