A Big (unwelcome) Change
Back in May, Google announced a major change in pricing for their Maps platform. This would cause common use-cases to cost anywhere between 10x to 100x of the earlier prices. Their developer community and customers were…wait for it…not pleased!
Fast forward 3 months to August; the pricing changes are live and Google’s users are getting first inflated bills, with some paying over 100X higher than before! Let’s head over to Twitter to look at some reactions that sufficiently reflect the outrage:
Some of the reactions that aptly reflect the outrage:
Holy shit @googlemaps. My bill went from $40 to $3000+ dollars? We will definitely be looking at alternatives.
— Joel Esler (@JoelEsler) August 6, 2018
@googlemaps looks like we’re breaking up with you. 💔Our relationship took a wrong turn after you changed your pricing plan and our bill ten-folded (~70k/yr), placing you far away from the competition. So, it looks like we’ll be making our way without you.
[Recalculating route]
— Andy Jansson (@Andy_Jansson) August 2, 2018
#googlemaps sudden pricing change is baffling. Time to switch to open source solutions! https://t.co/YdipASB22F
— Fabrice Dewasmes (@fdewasmes) May 15, 2018
Time to switch?
If you resonate with those tweets, and are affected by this change, you are probably scouting for alternative geolocation solutions that are actually affordable. We get that. For most developers or businesses, significant price markups without additional value, restrictive terms of usage and limited free tiers’ simply don’t make business sense.
At LocationIQ, we’ve witnessed this dramatic change and it’s bloody aftermath from the sidelines. We took this as a learning opportunity to communicate with our developer community to understand their challenges and reservations. These conversations prompted us to make our pricing even simpler, while increasing the value – in terms of free tiers, great data quality and friendly support – we give to our users.
Change is good
If you are looking to switch, may we ask that you give our APIs a spin? We support nearly all the use-cases Google’s Maps API does, with a Directions API on the way!
We promise never to disrupt your business with a price increase.
We’ve got:
- THE most affordable pricing
- THE most generous free tier at 300k requests / month
- Absolutely no limits on caching
- The ability to truly customize plans
- A support team that replies within a day, even if you aren’t a paying customer (yet!)
- API’s that are backed by multiple data sources such as OSM, OpenAddresses, WhosonFirst, Polylines, TIGER & Geonames.
- Service level agreements and priority endpoints on demand
- The ability to scale from 10k calls per day to over 10 billion per day
If you are overwhelmed by all the alternative options, do reach out to us and we promise to help you arrive at a fair decision! Just write to us at [email protected] !