"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."
I think this is one of the most important points in the article - the way they handle these pricing changes destroys trust in Google's other business offerings. How can people use Google products and services as a core piece of their infrastructure when they're willing to bump their prices >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't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/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.
While I'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 client
A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/develop the product and lets both them and me explore the real value of the service.
It tells me they'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've gone a bit too far.
Of course, they've done it very quickly, so they've likely not allowed enough time for the competition to step in or all their customers to abandon your now-expensive product.
> It tells me they're trying to minimize the number of users (which reduces their costs) by raising the price while still making it profitable.
Is the marginal cost of serving extra users really a big part of Google's costs? Bandwidth is cheap; I would have expected that building and updating the map data was the expensive part.
After all, they've long done away with the tile servers of the past and the giant render farms to make the millions of tiles at 20 different zoom levels to cover the earth. Now it's in browser rendered vector graphics.
Unless the vector information is getting much more expensive (shouldn't be, they own Waze and GMaps mobile products to make their own maps from user data), the cost of running GMaps should be going down on a per user bases, not up.
Maybe they expect a big increase in the cost of imagery acquisition
(from what I was able to glean they had a deal for a certain fixed price for a certain period, which might be coming to an end - https://spacenews.com/planet-confirms-google-stake-as-terra-...).
I'm not concerned about bandwidth costs. I'm concerned about support costs. People who use an API have an annoying habit of calling and submitting support tickets for that API.
>A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/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 "ermagerd, you're evil, I need this, you can't expect me to pay!". 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'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".
>When it comes to Google, I'm more worried that they might just arbitrarily mothball something on a management roadmap whim.
I'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.
> People lost their damn minds when Netflix increased prices a year or two ago and I'm like "erm, I get way more value out of this than cable and it's a tenth the price, shut up".
For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Most people I know who stream (ok all people I know) get way more value out of streaming than cable. What is your line on fair pricing for streaming compared to cable, as the service has obvious value to the user?
I don't think anyone, here of all places, would suggest a product requiring engineers and infrastructure be free for commercial use and that the company shouldn't recoup costs.
The good news is, like streaming services, there is competition and pricing will work itself out in the market (assuming no collusion :P)
>For your analogy to work you would need to say you are content with Netflix raising their prices >10x (no longer a 10th of cable) because that is what Google just did with their pricing.
Netflix raised their prices what they felt they needed to. Google raised their prices what they felt they needed to.
If people don't like it they're more than welcome to go to the competition... which in both cases generally has inferior product.
It looks like this specific change almost entirely inconveniences businesses and not private individuals. They're allowing 28k FREE requests a month which is still beyond generous. That's enough for a small entity to develop a service or product around the service and not only get it working but develop a decent alpha, or extremely modest beta, base of users. Then, just like other businesses, you get to put on your big boy pants and accept the cost of doing business.
Does the power company hand out free power?
Does the water company hand out free water?
Does the phone company let you have free calls?
No. So Google is still allowing a more than fair FREE level of commercial usage and now want to actually monetize their product. If it's adding value to your business, paying the new rates is a cost of doing business. Build it into your pricing, adjust your budget. This is the real world, not Narnia.
I imagine in the most common cases the application is effectively advertising "here are our locations, come to one" and by the point of showing the map you should have already removed a significant number of non-conversions making it VERY fair pricing.
In instances where you are using it to actually build a product around, it's still likely orders of magnitude cheaper than buying, and maintaining, map data yourself. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if one year's cost is only a few percent of what it would cost you to initially buy all of the data and develop software for navigating and hosting it.
People allow free, and cheap, things to make them feel entitled. It's easy to do, it really is, but it's something people need to be more mindful of before freaking out.
All I read in that blog post is "HOW DARE GOOGLE! They want us to pay for a service we use! Pity us! Shame Google for wanting to not operate at a loss! How dare they! How. Dare. They!"
We’re talking of Google Maps the platform and its B2B offering whereas Netflix, cable and phone companies are services for consumers with fixed and reasonable consumer-level monthly subscriptions.
If you haven’t built an app on top of Google Maps, then you pretty much have no idea how much it costs and have zero valuable input you can give.
Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch. They did it before with App Engine as well, first fooling early adopters in order to gather popularity and then raising prices enough that it made plenty of startups to move off the platform.
Along with other blunders in their products, it makes one wonder how anyone can trust any of their offerings long term.
Too bad the US has lost its anti-trust teeth btw, because what Google is doing is to subsidize its offerings until they get popular, effectively using their monopoly to gain popularity in other markets, thus hurting their competition unfairly.
>Also, this isn’t the first time Google is doing this bait and switch.
It isn't a bait and switch. It's introductory pricing. They attracted developers and businesses to a product people essentially weren't using, they let people work with it at or near a loss and now that they have a customer base they are trying to make it profitable.
Yes, they'll lose some of their users that want a free ride. They'll also retain many users that will happily pay under the new pricing scheme because they recognize the value add and find it to be a worthy business expense.
It's no different than companies like MailChimp offering free-for-so-many-subscriber pricing and then requiring you to pay once you reach a threshold they've determined makes you a billable customer. Or a company like Evernote allowing you to save so much data (what a map tile is) and use so many devices a month for free before requiring you to subscribe at one of the paid tiers. Or a company like Pushbullet allowing you to mirror so many SMS messages a month before charging.
If you can't easily handle the pricing change, then you are probably wasting your time using it in the first place and need to discontinue using maps anyway or reassess your own business model.
You seem to have read an entirely different story. The customer Google is losing here is clearly willing to pay, not expecting a free ride.
And there is absolutely no similarity between your MailChimp example and what Google has done in this case. The customer didn't complain about costs rising as the number of users starts to exceed an existing threshold.
That said, I wouldn't be so quick to call for the regulator. All businesses have a responsibility to select suppliers carefully and manage their dependency on any one of them. It appears to me that the value of contracts has been forgotten.
The post that I have read complains about an extreme and sudden change in Google's pricing structure and then goes on to compare alternatives for most of post, all of which are non-free.
They also say "Of course, we always knew that as we grew larger, there would be cost to using Google Maps."
> A big price bump with a few months notice is painful (and I'm glad it's bringing competition), but it tells me they're thinking seriously about how to sustain/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.
The simple existence of competitors in a market segment is not proof that there is no monopoly. We wouldn't say for example that there are realistic copetitors in the web search space or in the desktop OS space - maps is similar to both of these sitations.
(Now I realise that some people like to argue the toss about whether search and desktop OS are monopolies and to that I have no comment)
It's helpful to think about market share per "competitor", not number of competitors:
"However, from a regulatory view, monopoly power exists when a single firm controls 25% or more of a particular market. For example, De Beers is known to have a monopoly in the diamond industry."
Since API's aren't standardized and conversion from one product to another likely requires development work and probably impacts your usage in some way even then - the barriers to switching are high enough that the availability of alternative maps still doesn't represent a whole lot of competition.
Sure, typically yes. It's not necessary - interoperable APIs exist, and for underdogs they're even attractive as a selling point - but market leaders tend not to play by those rules.
Jacking up the price so far that it becomes prohibitive to actually use, on short notice, isn't much different from shutting it down, is it? In both cases you suddenly can't use the service anymore.
Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes.
As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?
The problem isn’t that Google wants to charge for a service. The issue is that they offered it for years for free or below cost effectively price gouging any competition. Now, with no alternatives they jack up the price. Classic monopolistic and anticompetitive behaviour.
When I was a teenage I was told that thats how drug dealers operated - get you hooked on something for free, then ramp up the price once you are hooked.
Never heard of any drug dealer that did that in my adult life, but I do see a lot of large corporations using that business model.
I'm always so confused by this. I switched to Feedly the day Reader went away. It was just as good then and is better now. I subscribe to way more stuff now than I did then. I've never understood how this "killed the entire medium".
I use RSS daily, but I am very much anomaly among my friends. For most people I know RSS just withered and died and got replaced by Facebook or whatever asocial media they are on.
I ended up rolling my own server (in scheme using sxml) and writing some minimal clients for it (tui, Emacs and web). It is running on a raspberry pi 2 and is currently using about 5mb of memory (the guile runtime is a large chunk of that) and has been down once since I started it 5 years ago (power outage).
Reader was to me the absolute best example of the good old web. Since then it seems like the web became insane with the idea of reinventing UI, which was then forced down our throats for both web and desktop, ruining two paradigms that worked just fine.
Sure, yeah, using RSS is rare, but it always was, and nothing was going to keep the vast majority of people from using Facebook and Twitter instead.
I don't understand why you rolled your own server. Feedly works great. If you did it because it's a fun project, that's awesome! But it certainly isn't necessary if your goal is just to subscribe to RSS feeds.
Back then the only alternatives were either commercial with shitty data policies or TTRSS which scared me away as it back then was probably the most hostile open source project on GitHub.
So I rolled my own. I will probably port it to use SQL so I can do easy searching when my kids move out :)
If we're doing anecdata when Reader was killed off I tried Feedly, didn't like it, stopped consuming via RSS. I've recently tried Newsblur but honestly I never check the thing despite having it on every device I can. I don't think RSS is a thing for me anymore outside of technically podcasts
Uh... the linked article compared 8 different competitors on various metrics. There are reasonable ways to disagree with Google's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.
I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly.
I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.
If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.
Companies with deep pockets trying and failing to gain a meaningful share in a market is more proof of a monopoly or other anti-competitive behavior, not less.
"Dumping" i.e. Putting out a product below cost to eliminate competitors is one of the fundamental forms of anticompetitive behaviour. All of Googles "free" products seem to fit the definition - they would not profitable standalone without Google's dominance in other markets and companies only operating in a single market cannot compete.
They are failing to provide comparable service, and thus failing to get meaningful share. I heard Apple maps is recently ok, but a couple of years ago when I tried it, it was still bad. Google has about 10 times more info than Apple or bing per building I look up (though, surprisingly, OSM is 90% of the way there for me).
Or is it because being in a #1 market position with a (until now) free price tag attracted thousands of volunteers submitting content and corrections for free?
There are reasonable ways to disagree with Microsoft's policy here, but "no alternatives" and "monopolistic" are just laughably silly.
Your comment completely disregarded the possibility that there's a dominant market position. Which there is. It is hard to compete with free. Ask e.g. TomTom or Microsoft.
The article said nothing about making it free, it said that the costs, which were previously in line with competitors, increased by very, very large amounts without any perceived increase in value. Then they looked at options which were commercial offerings which cost dramatically less. They are paying for the service, it's not subsidized or free. It's like you didn't read any of the article.
I'm doing the same. Been a local guide aswell. And if you are not based in the US, you never got ANY benefit from Google for that effort. I did it for the society. And now Google is earning 10x more with it...
>Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
If startups need a giant subsidized operating system for free or else they weren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?
>As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?
Yeah, Google has vacuumed up incredible amounts of mapping data from users and has now jacked up the prices with the lead this gave them. OSM (or something similar) is the way to share the cost. Google just abused their goodwill and used their other power positions to discourage open source. Whining about Google while moving elsewhere is entirely appropriate.
What? Your counter-counterpoint doesn't make sense at. Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows. If your business can't recoup the cost of an os per employee then yeah...maybe it's not a worthwhile venture.
> Lots of startups can afford the per seat cost of OSX or Windows.
On the desktop side of things that only happens because of Linux, otherwise (if guys like Ballmer would have had their way at the end of the '90s - early 2000s) those startups would now be paying hundreds of dollars per Windows license per each machine (and maybe more depending on the number of cores? the sky would have been the limit, the same as Oracle did in their field). And not to mention the server side of things, I'm pretty sure the costs for server OS licenses would have been prohibitive for the vast majority of startups without the alternative free OS solutions.
It is not about free. It is about being more expensive than before. We live in the economy, where small companies operate at such a thin margin (even if they're profitable), that such an increase in cost often kills any hope for profitability, especially with the economies of scale. Would you prefer to fire one developer from the team, or stop using Google Maps?
I am not saying that mapping should be free, but such price bumps should be communicated better to allow paying customers prepare for changes and alternative scenarios.
And again, just another reminder, that whenever choosing a provider for anything related to your core business - think of an exit plan!
Here we go again with the "No subscription fees means you have the right to like what we give you" argument. Haven't we beaten the "nothing is actually free" horse into the ground by now? There is the matter of the vast amounts of data Google collects from people, and the other intangible costs you incur from the lack of alternative products due to the high barrier to entry (hard to compete with 'free'), and of course the risks that come with the lack of incentive on the vendor's part to maintain good will with the end user (this thread is case in point).
I completely disagree. You can find Google's pricing tactic aggressive, but it made me think about the entitlement there.
They complain that Maps at new prices would be more than the cost of their infrastructure, when actually their entire startup revolves around this data, and 5k to be able to use an amazing piece of high tech software that is ahead of the competition is..peanuts.
No matter what other business interests and strategies Google follows, there is no right to using such valuable tech for less than the monthly salary of an engineer. I find this incredible entitled.
No, although of course there is the point that a lot of Google's mapping data was subsidized with tax money by virtue of using the various geodata sources the U.S makes available for free to build on.
Anyone can use those, so why are people complaining?
Google does a whole lot more, and can charge whatever they want for it. OSM provides usable solutions the vast majority of users; i’ve Moved to OSM a couple of years ago in everything for privacy reasons and except for the occasional Waze route or verifications, get nothing from google that I can’t get from OSM.
Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized transport infrastructure/global telecomunications network/permissive government/low-cost computer hardware/solid legal system or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.
> In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/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's phrasing of the strategy was "create a desert of profitability around you". The discussion of moats vs deserts found here [1] is also useful.
Almost every conversation I've had with someone working at a startup in this city inevitably turns to the "so, are you worried Google will simply start offering your service for free?"
I remember like 3 or 4 years ago having this conversation at a hackathon with a bunch of "Machine Learning" / "Sentiment Analysis" APIs present... right as google started offering both for free on their cloud platform.
It is free for consumers, not for organizations. Gmail for consumers doesn't have a business model by itself, but it fits into Google's larger business model.
If it wasn't a viable business model, Google wouldn't move into the space. It's just that they first use their infinite pocket money to kill off all the competition, then switch to making money.
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's a win for them. It's a win for other mappers because now they can compete on price. It's a win for users because they are getting more choice.
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'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.
> 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.
There's a great deal of competition and that generally results in a race to the bottom. The market leader just removed themselves from the market and the best way to capitalize is stay low and build your userbase.
We won't see price changes by any of these companies. They all want to be #1.
When you have a service that’s ten times cheaper than the best service, people start to raise eyebrows. They perceive it to be much worse. It isn’t always true, but it’s not uncommon either. I doubt companies are going to race to the bottom.
In the context of a business building a service around it, a mapping service is not a consumer product. Superficial perception only go so far until it is debunked by careful scrutiny. I would certainly hope that a startup deciding to build a service relying on a map provider would test, and measure quantitatively how good the service is before choosing to build their business on top of it...
Google Maps API is not a consumer product, which is where you might have an argument there. A good engineer identifies their use-case and checks out the major players to determine what's a good fit. Once that determination is made, pricing is pretty much all that matters.
> I still have to understand openstreetmap mapping solutions. It'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.
I'm not sure what you mean with "free"/"open". The OSM licence has a share-alike part if you merge your own map data with OSM data. If you just have a map and put points on it, it'd be fine.
It's not free as in you are not allowed to use OSM tiling servers for commercial purposes. "OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. [...] OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not." [1]. They've even banned some sites for abusing their servers, e.g., FastPokeMap in 2016 [2]. But there is a very clear way of switching to OSM and serving your own map tiles with any styling you want [3]. I personally think that startups like these should go for these options since their user base is concentrated in one region.
Well if you don't like the OSM.org tile usage policy, they'll give you a full refund.
OSM.org doesn't prohibit commericial usage, per se. But if you're running a business, you shouldn't rely on volunteers from another project which you're not paying for.
This. Services are invited to take a slurp of data and use it as they wish, and contribute back of they make changes. It's not uncommon for a service of a certain size to become a contributor. But there's no requirement: if all they use it for is lookups and tiles, go ahead, "fill yer boots".
>In the case of maps, there weren't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/profit potential out of the field with their excellent free offerings.
ianal and all that, but isn'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'd be pretty illegal.
IANAL either, but yeah, the practice you'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 "predatory pricing", which is illegal. IIRC, Standard Oil was a big user of that playbook.
I don't know if this qualifies, and I don't know how much appetite there is for prosecuting Google for offering useful things for free. I don't think they've had much of a history of jacking up prices after killing off a market, until relatively recently. Interesting question, though.
Isn't this done all the time by Google though? They offer so many services for free, such as the consumer version of Google Maps, or YouTube (in the early days before ads)?
Not to mention Internet.org from Facebook, TOM's (free) shoes in Africa.
It does sound a lot like it, but I don't know if there's some other element you have to do to make it engaging in predatory pricing, or if there's just been no will to prosecute them yet. The FTC seems like it's been relatively lax on antitrust recently, so I could believe it's just the latter. Or maybe it's just the remnants of the free pass that governments gave the early internet, and we'll start seeing more.
Possibly not. HN sits behind Cloudflare. Your SSL connection terminates at Cloudflare to plaintext, and new SSL connection to HN is created.
Your login and password, IP and User-Agent and other bits, are in cleartext to Cloudflare.
Much less likely if you have VPN, did not give email and made random login/password. OPSec.
What are you trying to say? Cloudflare doesn't give you any more privacy.
In the highly hypothetical case that someone would actually investigate this they'd get this IP from HN's host or Cloudflare, then get their identity and then go forward with removing him from the bar association if found guilty.
No VPN case. You busted by your ISP IP logged by HN.
VPN case. I logged in HN and gave legal advice :) Minute later I logged in Reddit, same IP, same browser, probably tracking cookies too (Reddit is behind CF too). Now CF can link my HN and Reddit logins. Chances are, I logged into Reddit without VPN days ago - IP - Busted. Not so hypothetical, imho.
I am not actually a lawyer, I am random dude on the internet, that was the point, there is absolutely no need for the disclaimer. I can literally claim to be be a lawyer, recommend extremely terrible advise and not have to worry. "Iamnal" is something that needs to die.
Well, that's cool for you. But you are a relative newcomer here, at least your handle is (yes, pot, meet kettle -- but I've been here 9 years and quite a few people know that) and reputation, merit of the info, etc matters to quite a lot of the members here.
It matters in part because truth matters to a lot of people here. Actual reality matters to a lot of people here. It's a bunch of pedants.
And if you want to make it a habit of genuinely claiming to be a lawyer when you aren't and intentionally giving bad advice, you might eventually find that the mods will ban you for trolling.
> bunch of pedants.
> mods will ban you for trolling.
This culture, while nice, cannot scale. At some point or another, an online community becomes an image of the wider social community it serves, regardless of the intentions of the founders or ephemeral royalty.
Just like Facebook or Reddit (d)evolved, HN cannot forever maintain a 70s hacker ethos and mannerisms. At some point or another the current reality of today's Silicon Valley tech bros and gold rush mentality will come to dominate, as it indeed has.
So I believe paulie has a point, IANAL is superfluous on any internet forum, this one included. And yes, that's solid legal advice I can give with full professional authority.
I have a history of joining forums, watching them grow dramatically while I'm there, leaving and watching them become a shell of their former selves afterwards. I spent some years feeling like a forum killer and afraid of the power I appeared to wield, but didn't understand and didn't feel in control of.
I have not played such a central role on HN. But it is quite clear in my mind that the right cultural practices are critical to making a large forum live and breathe at all. Because if they are enforced by only one person and that person walks out the door, the forum collapses in upon itself and traffic shrinks to a level that can be sustained by the cultural practices that remain.
I think this is a battle worth fighting. Merely agreeing with your point of view and throwing in the towel guarantees defeat.
There is literally no reason to ever us Imanal. Ever. It's a stupid unnecessary disclaimer that dates back to the 90s. My point was I can literally give terrible legal advice, claim to be a lawyer and their will be zero issues. The disclaimer isn't necessary
It's not [only (in some people's view)?] to avoid liability, it's to give the reader a warning that whilst the writer is convinced of the situation they don't have legal training, the writer recognises the complexity of the law and that due to that complexity their assessment may be flawed.
It's like giving a restaurant recommendation second-hand, "but I've never eaten there". Or with tech, "but I've never done it".
With people I know I disclaim _social_ liability with "this is not legal advice" -- it's not for legal reasons, it's to say please ask a lawyer before you rely on this for something serious, don't blame me you need to check for yourself.
That's your opinion. What I am telling you is that it isn't consistent with cultural norms here. If you don't wish to use the disclaimer "IANAL" (I am not a lawyer) -- which I am spelling out because your comment says Imanal, which looks like gibberish to me -- then you are free to not use it.
But most people here aren't likely to agree with you.
This is the internet. All I have to go by is the actual writing on my screen. I was merely being as accurate and clear as I know how to be and not assuming it was a misspelling. I was merely covering all bases to make sure we are as on the same page as possible.
Not worried about liability, just letting people know that there's a very good chance that I've completely misinterpreted the law. Maybe you're right and it's not useful.
Poor grandparent got nuked in the votes, but I actually think this is an interesting discussion. It ties to my thoughts about politeness and behavior on the internet, which ties to my thoughts about the same IRL. Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends" type stuff.
Is it effective to "hedge" your arguments/posts/words with a "now I might be wrong" / "you may know more about this than me" / "I'm not a lawyer" ? I spent 4 years hearing sales gurus tell me to not do it, exude confidence. Then I had Dale Carnegie and my favorite manager ever tell me the exact opposite. I've tried both, and the "Carnegie" method seems to work best for me both online and off.
It's not just "IANAL" - the most positive responses I've seen on reddit, twitter, and here have some sort of "hedge." When I employ it, I get great responses (and lots of upvotes, which is other than response rate and quality of responses the only measure we can really use). When I don't, I get downvotes.
Sometimes the "confident asshole" approach works here and on reddit, but it can backfire HORRIBLY - see the absolute nightmare situation happening over at ArenaNet - some guy didn't quite hedge in the right way and caused a total breakdown of community/developer trust. What a mess. I bet the developer wouldn't have felt quite so attacked if the commentor had hedged a bit better. See also, any email chain Linus Torvald gets involved in.
Now this just starts a whole other discussion about whether someone should "have to" hedge, etc etc. I'm just voicing my thoughts here, curious what others think.
In short, a woman working at ArenaNet, the company running GuildWars2 (an MMORPG), posted a twitter thread about her thoughts on designing narratives in an MMO. A prominent (male) streamer of the game responded with his opinion, which (as he stated) was a disagreement of her point of view. To this, the ArenaNet employee expressed her opinion that the streamer was explaining to her how to do her job, and implied he was doing this because she is a woman.
Quite predictably the exchange exploded into a shitstorm of epic proportions, which supernovaed when ArenaNet responded to the incident by firing the employee.
I think the response by the community at large to the woman's firing is despicable, and the firing was probably not justified. But, I have been thinking a lot about the words of the exchange, and how much of a clusterfuck the situation is. The exchange itself is, in my opinion, not black and white. To be fair, I say this as a guy, so it's entirely possible that I Just Don't/Can't Get It. I accept that and am happy to be pushed back on.
The words:
>ArenaNetEmployee: {{29 tweet thread discussing character writing in MMOS}}
>Streamer: "Really interesting thread to read! However, allow me to disagree slightly. I don't believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself..."
>ArenaNetEmployee: "Today in being a female game dev: "Allow me--a person who does not work with you--explain to you how you do your job."" {{quotes streamer}}
I feel like this whole shitstorm could have been avoided if the streamer had hedged just a bit better, or instead had asked her opinion. Basically, in the discussion, setting her up as the expert (which she is), while still expressing an opposed position. This is basically what hedging does anyway.
This is a really unique point of view. I think conversations would be improved with this mentality.
It might be a bit hard to swallow, though. Who's to say that a streamer is less qualified to analyze character writing in MMOs? After all, the writer is usually not the one impacted by the game. Streamers are.
I know nothing about this situation, though. </hedge> I'm just saying that it would personally feel difficult to adopt this mindset if I felt like I were qualified to express a dissenting opinion.
Well, yea, the guy is definitely qualified to have an opinion, and probably the developers should take note. In this case it just set of an unfortunate misogyny finger pointing nightmare that led to the ridiculous firing of two employees.
To your second point, that's another thing I think a lot about. Honesty, in its many forms. I value honesty tremendously, because how can two individuals (or a community) operate in good faith if people are being dishonest with each other? However... we are irrational. When I was a recruiter, going to a company with my candidate's actual rate, and then turning around and giving my candidate the actual offer, would lead to bad tastes on both sides. Instead, I'd lie to the company, tellm my candidate was asking for more, then then around and tell the candidate that the offer was less than what they were looking for. Then I'd let both parties stew for a bit, give the candidate a call back, and lo and behold I got them an extra five bucks an hour like magic (citing the actual offer). Then, both parties would feel they had really gotten the most possible value out of the transaction and be happier for it.
So then what do you do in interpersonal communication? Are you upfront and honest about your feelings regarding your qualifications? Do you state your opinions forthright, while still being polite? Or do you "play the game?"
I guess it boils down to your values. If you want to consistently be liked more, listened to more, and "get your way" more, you heed the wisdom of the ancients and do the Dale Carnegie. Even if it hurts.
In my experience though, it stops hurting very quickly. Turns out a lot of the times I was confidence in how right I was, I was way off base... And I usually end up learning something by seeing things from the opponent's perspective.
I don't know a ton about the situation -- I do know that the streamer in question was active enough with the community that an NPC in the game was named after him, though.
Some missing details, which I would call critical.
1) The day before there was a big AMA where players and developers talked about the story design, initiated and organized by the game studio. The fired developer was a prominent figure in the discussions, and the twitter thread was seen by most as an further extension to that AMA. People can have different opinion about this, but its important to know the context of when the twitter thread appeared.
2) The initial response by the community at large was both on reddit and on the official Guild Wars 2 Forum to not fire anyone. It was only later unearthed that the developer had also celebrated when cancer victim John Bane died at age 33. At this point many have pointed out that the community changed view and could no longer support having such individual in the community, and a massive thread called something like "Developers should also have to follow Anet own conduct policy" was created.
Hedging is useful, but there is some lines which companies and communities are unlikely to accept. Celebrating the death of cancer victims is one, and is likely not something any one want to be associated with. The second aspect is to not responding to art criticism with labeling the person as sexist to 10k followers, which given the close connection to Anet organized AMA and the fact that their name is directly next to the message could make Anet legal liable for slander. Third, game developer is closely connected to community management and there is a good reason why conduct policies exist and get enforced. One could argue in defense that twitter is "personal" and out of the conduct policy scope, but that is very much up to discussion and it seems that the guild wars 2 community is generally in favor that such policy do cover developers talking about the game on social media, especially in connection to community events.
Reading what's in the articles and twitter the firing sounds too much. On the other hand I don't see the guy needing to be even more courteous. She could tell him that his idea doesn't work, there are complexities he wouldn't understand or that she doesn't want outside opinions or whatever. Calling him names for no real reason and inventing gender bias to me is pointless. Yes he could have bias in his heart but you can't start judging people assuming things.
If you start making silly things about gender than the real problems gets lost and you hurt the cause that you are trying to promote. The subsequent twitter posts doesn't read good to me either. But some of the backlash against her was equally or probably even more so outrageous. The anonymity and distance that social media gives it users seem to in general bring out the worst in people except for rare exceptions.
Just my opinion of course, but I see the basic problem as employees using twitter. Many companies encourage employees to use twitter, social media, etc. for more direct interaction with customers, the community, etc.
What is often overlooked, is that in communication you are first an employee of a company, and your own opinions and feelings come way later.
As is clear in this example, not everybody can do this (all of the time).
She is certainly entitled to this opinion. But as an employee, she should not have expressed it. Most likely the company didn't reflect on this before allowing/encouraging her to use twitter to communicate.
I'm speculating that the company didn't have a communication strategy to contain a shit storm. And in the end just fired the employee. Firing the employee only makes sense if she has a history of causing the kinds of issues.
A lawyer can be wrong, and so can Torvalds, but yea, they may be more likely to be wrong.
Nobody has to, but in my experience, you do seem to get a much more positive reaction when you do.
At least in Western culture, it seems a well played "humble" character is admirable, especially when it is known that the particular person has absolutely no reason to be humble.
EDIT: I don't expect anybody to hedge "just because", but I expect that a person with extremely good interpersonal communication skills to hedge.
In small talk, yes, be polite and humble everywhere.
In science and engineering, I prefer it has some meaning. If you're sure in what you're saying, have data to back it up, dealt with it before - say straight. If it's a guess, say it is a guess.
So I would not spend time guessing was it politeness of lack of facts behind that hedging. Btw, I upvoted GP :)
Sure, but a lawyer / Torvalds / any SME might want to hedge that their opinion is strong or not.
There's a pretty darn big difference between "my gut feeling is that this approach is too complicated, but I've not analyzed the problem sufficiently to know whether my gut is correct" and "there's no way this is the right architecture, it'll have harmful impact, and there's lots of better ways to do it".
It's imo especially important to do so from positions of authority where others might be less critical in accepting ones statements as truth.
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'd be pretty illegal.
This is what drug dealers do.
It was also the plot of the James Bond film Live and Let Die.
I doubt anyone is driving out competition with free product, but using free product to hook a new client is definitely a thing that happens.
That's not too say that there's guys on street corners offering free drugs to random passersby. Rather there's lots of dealers who just deal to aquaintances, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, etc. In that case they can spread a few hundred dollars worth of product around to non-users within their social network in hopes of picking up another client or two, who will end up generating reliable profit for a long time.
i think uber at least (not that i want to defend anything they do) is different, because they don’t have low rates to smother their competition; they have low introductory rates to attract riders and drivers to the service
unsure if that’s also predatory pricing? seems different to me
Just because they have a nice PR-friendly story to tell doesn't make the pricing any less predatory. The point of predatory pricing is to attract people to the service, to shut down competition.
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'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.
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.
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.
Google did something similar with Stackdriver logging, where they went from a generous free tier to an insanely expensive $.50/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.
They've got easy to use exclusions that eliminate the cost if you don'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.
Why you cannot trust this model 101: because it's practitioners understand the value of the labor/product,
capitalize on the OSS ideal and then push it to the unsuspecting.
I don'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'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/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.
Re: "...is surely an unpleasant surprise for us and does not create much trust in Google as a vendor..."
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.
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.
> 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
It seems like they haven't learned anything at all. Sure it was google that shafted them in this case, but the problem isn't google, it'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.
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.
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.
Well what Google did at this instance and on nowadays is evil
What do you mean it'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'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).
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.
I'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.
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't be that resource intensive.
I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04... (yes they are for Ubuntu but you'll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don'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 (http://geoserver.org) 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 (https://leafletjs.com) to actually display the map and points!
The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don'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.
That's correct — I'd forgotten that, as my project has the open data use license.
However, as an example, the one-time $40 for Colorado is likely to be much cheaper than generating them yourself, and is probably adequate if you don't need to keep up to date.
We are looking at moving to Vector tiles after the deployment of openstreetmap raster tiles is completed. We need to look at the performance closely though because on some devices it was slower with Vector tiles. I think we still want to go that direction we just have to quantify some of the performance.
You can render raster on the fly from a vector based tileserver, and optionally use vector maps for clients where it makes sense (mobile for example).
I've been running a large OSM raster rendering stack for a while, for the whole planet. Moving on to a vector based stack right now, which is what you should do if you are starting today. The reason being the server, with vector tiles pre-rendered, can very quickly render raster tiles on the fly. It's fast enough that for most cases, there is no need to cache them. Once I get the new stack fully burned in, we'll swap our raster rendering stack out for the new vector stuff and do raster on the fly. I might cache the rasters depending on throughput, but from what I can tell it should be basically a non-issue.
The difference between raster tiles and vector tiles is that in raster tiles the rendering (conversion to actual images) is done on your server (either when each tile is loaded for the first time or you may initialize a bunch of zoom levels for your area yourself; this may take hours to days depending on your area size) while for vector tiles you just send the descriptions/shapes and the inages are created on the client side. It is expected that the client performance won't be as good as with raster tiles and slow clients like mobile phones will struggle while trying to render the images.
One interesting idea would be to have both raster and vector tiles; then in your client side code you could detect if the client is a mobile device or a desktop pc (I am not sure if you can detect more things about how speedy the device would be) and serve the corresponding tileset (ie the vector tileset if the device is desktop or the raster one if it is mobile). This way you will definitely decrease the load on your server and most clients won't have performance problems!
In any case, the clients will get faster as the time passes so after some years vector tiles would probably be the norm because they have the huge advantage that it is very easy to style them on-the-fly in any way you like (while, to style raster images you need to re-create them all from scratch).
This results in having a tile server that generates & serves raster tiles using:
* carto to generate a proper stylesheet
* mapnik to create the tiles
* apache with the mod_tile module to serve the tiles
* renderd to be used as a bridge between apache/mod_tile and mapnik
* Postgres/PostGIS as a database to host the data
The actual data is an OpenStreetMap pbf file downloaded from http://download.geofabrik.de/ which is inserted to the database through osm2pgsql.
The above are used for the raster tile server only.
In addition to this, I am using geoserver (http://geoserver.org/) which is a Java web app (runs in tomcat) that is used to view/edit and (mainly) serve geospatial data. What I usually do is that when I need to display a new shape (shp) file I use shp2pgsql to insert it to a table in my PostGIS database (using something like this shp2pgsql -s SRID SHAPEFILE.shp SCHEMA.TABLE | psql -h HOST -d DATABASE -U USER) also another good tool is ogr2ogr which can convert between various formats (it also supports kml, for example ogr2ogr -f "PGDump" koko.sql test.kml).
After the shp file is inserted to the database, I can create a datasource for this dataset from GeoServer and publish this dataset to the web (i.e the dataset will have a URL of the form http://1.2.3.4:8080/geoserver/Dataset/wms); it can then be consumed by client applications (in javascipt) using leaflet or openlayers. Notice that GeoServer can easily publish various file formats for example an SHP directly (you don't need to insert it to the PostGIS; this is something I do for better control of my datasources).
PostGIS is the component that supports the vector tiles (http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/extensions/vectorti...) so I want to integrate it the OpenStreetMap data that is hosted in my PostGIS (which is used for the raster tiles); I haven't found the time yet though.
I think it's a great setup and it works great for the needs of the organization I work for; actually, I like it so much that I want (for a long time) to write a rather comprehensive tutorial on how to set ip up along with some notes on how to do various PostGIS things but I don't know when (and if) I'll find the time for something so large :/
My apologies, I'm out-of-date with the commercial offerings of OpenMapTiles — I work on an open data project, eligible for OpenMapTiles' free license which has old (currently one year old) tiles.
With a commercial license, the tiles are from 2 July.
I assume the commercial tiles are a few days behind as it's just not worth most people's effort to stay up-to-the-hour — different map services can offer that, this company is making easy self-hosted map tile packages.
The free license is presumably using older data to encourage an upgrade.
Tile generation wasn'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 "render_list_geo.pl"). 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.
Yes it wasn't bad for a single area (we cover only Greece and it was quick and easy for such a small country). However I couldn't imagine of the resources needed to cover the whole world!
If you use vector tiles, and render them client side you could do this. For raster tiles, where you're storing images, there are too many images to do this practically.
And then you need to think of how to do data updates. OSM updates minutely.
Data updates are not required for many applications. You probably don't want to be google maps! For example I haven't updated the OSM data for more than a year and I don't think that there are any problems with the data being stale. It all depends on the application of course.
One major advantage of not updating your data very often is that the tile-images won't need to be re-generated thus you save a lot of (CPU intensive) resources! I think that another commenter mentioned that he generated the tiles in a CPU intensive system and then just off-loaded the images to not-so-fast system for serving.
You can also prerender the tiles on a powerful machine and host them on a cheap instance (assuming you don't need very large regions). A while ago I created an OSM server (https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep) 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.
* 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.
I haven't investigated updating of data using anything clever. I know the database load script can write out a list of tiles that need to be rerendered, which can be fed into the renderd process. Renderd has multiple priority channel so bulk renders are a lower priority than user views, so a live system can update the tilecache without much easier impact.
I haven't investigated it because we are probably moving to Vector tiles over the next month or two, and we don't need up to the minute map updates. On one of our sites, we have been rendering navteq tiles and we only get updates for those quarterly. It was only our public site that we were using Google Maps for.
Backup and restore we are just doing via normal backup programs. The tilecache is stored in meta tiles, which is a d duplicated set of 64 tiles in a single file. So we are only dealing with about a million files in a directory structure totaling 25 gigabytes.
If we needed to restore or update our tiles, we would probably just spin up a new box and rerun ansible to deploy it. I have it all encoded Within a Playbook.
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.
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't mind having Apple logo on our site somewhere, was just released as beta and requires Apple developer account to test properly."
The OpenStreetMap.org website doesn't ban commerical sites (per se). The volunteer sysadmins who manage the donated hardware that runs the OpenStreetMap.org website don't offer any SLA and reserve the right to ban people/apps which put too much load on it. If you don't like it, they're prepared to give you a full refund.
I read that, but compared to the effort they put into analysing the whole issue, at least an estimate about the cost involved in hosting their own server would be a good decision.
It seems like they rejected OSM because they couldn'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 think if the maps service is part of your core product, it is good considering a self hosted solution. Yes, it costs time you want to save as a startup, but at least you control your own product and can manage your cost directly.
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/sec, another is 1,300.
They are both virtual machines, 32GB and 32 CPUs for the 1,300/sec and 20CPUs for the 2,500/sec. The 32 cores are on a host machine with two "Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4108 CPU @ 1.80GHz", the 20 cores are "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v2 @ 3.50GHz". You know, 7,001.21 bogomips (TM). :-)
How does Mapbox stack up against what you'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?
How does Mapbox stack up against what we've built? Well, they have way more people working on the problem, so there's going to be more support and more eyes on the problem. I didn'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'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's no big deal. If you want to build a business around it, that's always work. You're going to need to build the tiles, have infrastructure to serve it, monitoring, staff to manage it, billing and charging infrastructure, etc...
Mapbox also offers geocoding and navigation, which are quite a bit more difficult than just setting up a server that can host OSM tiles. Obviously, if all you need are maps, that's fine. But if you need maps with search, which I suspect most people do, rolling your own is tougher (though projects like pelias are pretty good).
I set up a pelias system a while ago but it never got any traction. We have another geocoder already set up using Experian QAS data, I think we've had that set up for a decade or more, so that isn't one of our concerns. Good point though.
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've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations.
I too want Google/Apple maps alternatives to succeed, but my limited trial so far has not been promising.
> I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations.
>there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations.
Unless Maps.Me use their own database for business listings, you just edit the map directly from openstreetmap.org or one of the many fat client map editors that are out there.
It'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 / 1000. Unlike with maps, Street View lacks a real alternative.
I'm seeing my own costs, for a site which I run on my own, rise from $1,500 / month to around $30,000 / 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 'premium plan' 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 / hobby projects.
If you read the original article, it gives you the impression that it's tiles only. But as you point out it'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 (https://geocodeplus.com.au) and a lot of people I talk to are completely unaware that they're going to see a x10 change in what their forward/reverse geocoding is going to cost them.
You'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's one: https://www.mapillary.com/pricing
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.
The issue isn't what google allows/prohibits, its that any new autonomous vehicle company could quickly amass a similar data set to street view and nullify googles 10 plus year investment driving non autonomous cars around to capture street view images.
It's not as simple as capturing the imagery. The backend processing for Google maps is astonishing. It will take years to get to the smoothness that is Google Streetview.
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'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's no real alternatives.
Bing Streetside and OpenStreetCam are a thing. They just aren't very good. There's a huge up-front investment for street view images that other companies didn't want to take.
Microsoft invested in it, released a product and the product wasn't as good as the market leader. That's not predatory.
Other companies didn’t want to make that huge investment BECAUSE of Google. Google offered the same service for free, which meant they had no recourse for recouping that investment. Now that has changed, and the lack of standing competitors is a direct result of that history.
Microsoft has made HUGE investments into Bing and yet Google was always superior and Microsoft isn't exactly rolling in money with Bing.
There are several competitors, the issue at hand is they have an inferior product. If your argument held any water, literally everyone would use TMobile because they are so much cheaper. Reality is, a products quality matters and Google Maps were both more cost effective AND a better product.
Just because there are competitors in a field does not mean that one company does not hold a monopoly. There were other oil companies in existence when standard oil was broken up.
I never said it did. The argument was that there was no competition. There is competition, it's just weak for some aspects of Google Maps. And the argument here seems to be that Google isn't allowed to start charging for a product because they didn't before, which is silly.
When it comes to Google I just have a lot of issues with the company and didn't have my real login handy when an article about them came up a few days ago. From big issues, like hiring Eric Schmidt and frequent attempts at anti-competitive behavior, to small ones, like prudish censoring of search results and weird customer service (including a six-month delay in getting a response to a simple request for a Maps enterprise quote), I could really just go on and on with the variety of reasons why I don't like Google. I've seen firsthand, at multiple Google locations, an odd attitude that must have permeated from the top. The only people that seemed to be different were a few acquihires who exuded a combination of resignation and pragmatism about their situation.
Edit: If you meant that you wanted more detail about my antitrust complaint, I contacted them via the antitrust email address. They took a while to call back, but not as long as Google took to get me that Maps quote...
I work for a startup that has mapping/routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google'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 'enterprise' 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.
I'm curious about how the conversations between Google and customers went about this change.
I'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 "This is the new price, take it or leave it!"? Or something else?
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/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 :)
Right, just using the plain gmaps tiles in a Leaflet tile layer is against the google TOS. But there is a Leaflet plugin that puts the whole google map component in a TOS-compliant way as a layer into leaflet and keeps both in sync with DOM observers. Sounds pretty weird but works perfectly in production.
It's a contract, not yet a law (thanks btw).
Contracts are usually taken pretty literally if the judge who decides sees significant time being put into the contract to make it include all forseable cases.
OpenStreetMap example looks superior but I think it didn't get enough research for this article.
Anyone can use Leaflet together with OpenStreetMap for free* for heavy commercial purposes[0] if you make your own mirror/render of OSM tiles. Also simple reverse proxy cache[1] can keep public servers usage acceptable. Styles can be also modified at render stage, e.g. [2].
*The cost is only your one time setup work and then any monthly hosting bill.
I encourage anyone to prefer these open alternatives and of course donate money, time or hosting to help develop them.
Agreed, if I needed an alternative to Google Maps then OpenStreetMap would be my first stop even if it meant some work setting up my own server. That way you largely insulate yourself from random price hikes like this.
My recent experience in various parts of the UK and one trip to northern Finland is that the OSM is superior to Google maps anyway. And with something like OSMAnd it's trivially easy to use offline.
* is the proxy cache an accepted use case also for commercial projects? Where can I find details about that?
* what is your recommendation for a geocoder?
Also I would like to ask you about your procedure for updating the OSM data and tiles - I found this to be a tedious process. Not at all is this a one-time set-and-forget thing, it is quite a bit of things to understand and maintain.
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't see a problem with this. On top of that people finally receive proper support from google once significant sums are involved.
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't scream antitrust I don'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.
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.
> 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'm sure you could name them all :P), but it's crazy to claim that there aren'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.
> Were there any significant competing maps APIs for the web in 2005?
Don't forget about services beyond providing Maps APIs. Google Maps basically killed the need for a standalone GPS purchase (Garmin/TomTom) as well as purchasing upgraded maps for existing GPS systems, including those built into a car.
Am I complaining? No, but Google gave away for free something that once would've been hundreds of dollars in software. I'm surprised TomTom and Garmin weren't put out of business yet from it, but they survived on their niche products.
Everyone is responding about non-APIs. GP was specifically talking about running competitors "out of business" and then raising prices on the maps API. Google Maps itself certainly hasn't become a paid app, so I'm not sure what point folks are trying to make.
Nokia maps was pretty decent. They had acquired Navteq, which had been in the business of mapping for decades. When Google maps just used to have a list of driving instructions, Nokia maps had full turn by turn voice navigation. Of course in this case Google maps didn't drive Nokia out of business, that was totally their own doing and maps was just one collateral damage.
Nokia Maps wasn't collateral damage. It is still very much alive and kicking. Nokia rebranded Nokia Maps as Here and and eventually sold it off. Here is still very much alive. Employees several thousand and is still a major player in the mapping services business.
Certainly in the UK, online maps were dominated by two independent companies - Multimap and Streetmap - which were pretty much wiped out by Google. Multimap sold to Microsoft while Streetmap limps on, its UI barely changed.
Vimeo has pretty much always had a shockingly* high price for their slightly-better plans, since they insist on covering their costs from subscriptions from the get-go. I'd be pretty confident they wouldn't bait-and-switch to grab some more cash (not the least since they're not the dominant video hosting provider). They compete on service and stability.
[*: in comparison to the other popular video hosting sites]
> 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/month (where before it was under a free tier) am I really any more likely to get 'proper support' from google? $2k/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/month as well.
It would be nice to think that, and I'll change my tune when I see it, but even after working with people who were paying for google cloud platform, I didn't think they we got terribly good support.
> OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites.
Not if I understand their terms correctly [1] [2]. Maybe there's a distinction between the terms of the map data itself and the software published to interact with it?
IIRC that's for the openstreetmap.org site, which wasn't built to answer queries from hundreds of commercial apps (like Maps API is). You're supposed to copy and deploy the dataset on your own servers so you don't burn bandwidth of the OSM project.
There'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't look like they considered) offers OSM data and APIs as an option alongside the MapQuest proprietary data and APIs: https://developer.mapquest.com/documentation/open/
And there'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.
MapQuest seems like it might be 6x more expensive than the others listed in the post, if "transactions" are the same concept: https://developer.mapquest.com/plans ($100 for 30,000 transactions)
(transactions aren't defined anywhere I can easily find tho, so it's possible this isn't correct. but I don't really mind prematurely concluding that they're significantly more expensive if they don't clearly describe their pricing system.)
We just use them on the free tier as well; we used to pay, but I think they upped their free tier a bit and sent us an email saying we didn't have to pay anymore (if I recall correctly). Their API was easy to integrate; haven't had to research mapping companies much recently, so not sure who I would pick now based on more data.
Entirely possible, I've only used their API well inside the free tier, I haven't compared pricing. I presume there's other OSM-compatible service providers with different pricing options as well.
I felt like the original article's way of phrasing this is slightly misleading, maybe based on confusion on the author'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'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'd reward effort with customizability and extensibility. I could certainly imagine that a lot of sites wouldn't be prepared to set up this toolset, and I realize that OSM doesn't provide a simple drop-in replacement for Google Maps that can be used by commercial sites.)
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'll have to either pay a tile provider that uses their data, or generate your own.
Having used/managed/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/forms are buried deep and inaccessible via Google search (or were), and for technical support you'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'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've noticed Google Cloud seems to be better managed with actual semblance of support but it's the only one I've had a good experience with.
I recommend Google's services to no one because the support is so abysmal and now the price is too (at least for maps).
Everything google does is to generate data points. Although the rest of the world raises prices to cover costs, increase profits, etc., Google plays with APIs, pricing, availability as a way to generate data to model the behavior of its customers. Simply raising prices to make more money is besides the point. Although the price hike may have been instigated by mundane factors, the way they do it is to understand who is using their product. They could have sneakily inched their way up. Like the frog in the water on the stove, it wont know its cooked until it's too late. Also Google could have (OMG) added ads to map tiles. Or they could have a price scale that changes as you engage more of their services (move your website to GCloud, get more map views for free). By making this most unlikely move ( a move that would alienate customers in most other markets) Google is implementing a limit theorem. It is trying to segregate its customers' behavior into different groups- groups that the customers themselves do not know exist or which they belong in. This kind of data is what they will use to inform their future investment.
On a side note, that frog in the water on the stove metaphor is a myth.
>According to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out.[3][4] Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.
The upside of this change is it should help raise awareness and investment in mapping products that are open source and use open data.
Off the top of my head, there are a number of companies/services that can serve as alternatives to Google Maps, and one way or another they all contribute to the collective quality of open source and open data map tools:
Roughly speaking, open data allows for lower prices because investing directly in gathering proprietary data is super expensive. Open data coverage is getting pretty good in lots of areas, and is better than proprietary data in a lot of developing cities (like Jakarta). It can often be updated much more quickly. Google is notorious for taking a long time to fix errors.
Likewise open source map tools are definitely behind Google in many respects, but there's the advantage of transparency and ease of migration if one particular provider happens to go away, or customization is needed.
I'm sure I'm missing some services, and am happy to talk more about any of the challenges/features as much as I know.
Disclosures: I am a co-founder of geocode.earth, and a former employee of Mapzen, along with the founders of Interline
I would never trust Google as a business partner based on only my personal experiences. Here is a list of problems I had with Google and its services;
- Firebase suddenly changed its pricing, claiming that they were calculating prices incorrectly. A tiny multiplayer game that I made for kids were not fitting the free tier anymore, and my account was locked until I make payment. A sudden e-mail at 6am in the morning was enough to take an app down. Customer service? It doesn’t exist. I lost the data and moved away. The stress didn’t worth it.
- Kozmos (getkozmos.com) extension was taken down although it was a simple, open source bookmarking extension (github.com/kozmos) with good description, many HQ screenshots and also a video. I noticed it when users began reporting they couldn’t find the extension. They didn’t even dare to reach me out after taking it down. I sent so many e-mails, users mentioned Google Chrome on Twitter, no response was given. Not even a single response. Again, I had no contact to reach out and ask what is wrong and how we can fix. I was so frustrated that I even wanted to build a new browser and ship my extension with it.
- Someone began impersonating me using my full name on blogger. I reported it countless times providing fresh copy of my passport every single time, not even a single response was given. No confirmation, nothing. The blogger is still there impersonating me. My friends also reported it, nothing happened.
Here is three experiences. Based on this, I learnt to never trust and rely on any Google service. The last thing is e-mail and search, and I’ll celebrate the day I’m completely free from any Google services.
To dogpile on, among my closest friends we've have over a dozen dead Pixel phones (due to hardware issues, though one started smoking) and a half dozen dead Nexus's.
Meanwhile, I'm essentially banned from Google Wallet for sending a friend $600 with a card I'd had on the account for years, with no way of recovering it without giving Google my SSN, multiple utility bills and passport. This is far beyond what Know Your Customer regulations require, and I still was well below KYC thresholds that their competitors use (PayPal, Zelle (no apparent limits)).
Considering my bank doesn't have my SSN or passport, I am not handing that out like candy to the world's premier data mining company for a highly questionable account review. This right here is why I'm on Zelle :P
> A tiny multiplayer game that I made for kids were not fitting the free tier anymore, and my account was locked until I make payment.
Doesn't Firebase have a daily quota, so your app just stops working for the rest of the day if it goes over quota? I though it would reset the next day.
Or in case of a storage quota you can't store more data until you delete some to go below the limit.
Did you try deleting some data, or they locked your Firebase access completely so you couldn't do anything?
> Someone began impersonating me using my full name on blogger
There are a lot of people in the world so the odds of someone having the same full name as anyone else isn't that low. Was this person impersonating you specifically beyond claiming that they have the same name?
I’m aware of that. It was an impersonation. Someone created a blog under my name and posted blog posts by copy pasting sections from an e-book. Why ? Google Ads :)
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're faced with ~20x jump. I.e. it heavily messes with the unit economics. The Google representative actually laughed in our face (via Hangout).
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.
There's not a single usable competitor to street view considering the coverage and quality. They got that imagery using money from non-maps revenue, while keeping Maps pricing artificially low for years, with the the practical effect of making sure that no one else could compete with them. So you can't switch street view providers if it's integrated into your product, and now you get to suck up an insane price increase. Which makes it in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act here in the United States and I'm sure the EU has even stricter rules on monopolies.
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't want to be snarky, but I think many businesses don't think enough about this issue of value creation.
That's exactly what I was suggesting: If you are stuck in a low margin business and see that a provider such as google is screwing up your margins, you should really try to work on another idea which has higher margins.
Working on a low margin business is a choice! You can always ditch it and try to find something with higher margins (= higher value created for users).
Did you miss where they wrote "a developing country"? There are places where a software developer's good salary is $10,000 a year.
Google doesn't need to provide a service in that country, but it's understandable that a 20× increase is going to hit harder than in a wealthy country.
No I did not miss it. Also I'm based in a neighboring country to Poland. The salary you mentioned won't get you a software developer anywhere in the EU.
I am only pointing out that entrepreneurs need to rethink their business models if they are hit by this price increase, as this is a very strong indication they are not working on a healthy, high-margin business.
A 20-30x increase in costs being a problem for your business isn't indicative of being in an unhealthy low-margin business per se, quite the opposite. If you were operating in a 95% profit margin industry, which is an insanely generous hypothetical, increasing the 5% cost component by 20-30x would destroy you overnight.
This is what happened to OP, and they were able to switch to haf a dozen competitors at a fraction of the price with almost equivalent service offerings for their use-case. The notion they have a fundamentally unworkable business model doesn't apply here.
If you'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/ad supported). This makes ad-supported much, much harder.
Name one billion dollar business that is a success today when 80% of its product is an API call to an externally owned service?
I get the frustration and pain with this, but let's be honest, if your business was totally reliant on Google Maps it probably wasn't a great business to begin with. Way too many eggs in a basket you don't own.
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 "why should we pay/develop X, Google does it for free" conversations at one of my previous employers who competes in the mapping space with Google.
I maintain a small hobby site that used to have two embedded Google maps. The site is absolutely tiny and would have been well within Google's free tier, and yet I happily moved away from Google Maps when they made the change.
Without warning, the two maps suddenly stopped working properly and were covered in grey boxes. Looking for a solution in the documentation, I noticed the new pricing model (the email notice only came after their final deadline) and decided to try generating new API keys. Unfortunately, Google didn't update their API console in time and I was thrown into an endless redirect loop.
When I was finally able to obtain my new keys some days later, the two embedded maps refused to load with an unspecific "no longer supported" message. Google's documentation also didn't seem to be updated with any breaking changes.
I then decided to move to OpenStreetMap, which also looks much better in my opinion.
Does anyone know of a good alternative to Google Places Autocomplete API? Our app makes 25k requests per day. They had a free 150k limit per day, but now it seems like we are going from $0 to $1,800 per month, and this is not a core feature of our app. I wouldn't mind paying a couple hundred dollars for it, but this price is almost what we pay for our whole infrastructure. The worst part is that we didn't get any notice and I learned about this increase here on HN.
I was investigating the Google Traffic API for an app I was working on just as they were making this change. They went from something like 10,000 free requests a day (which would have been plenty for my purposes) to 0 free requests a day. "Don't be evil" my ass. Anyway, the Azure Maps (which uses TomTom data) is much more generous.
I'm pretty much looking for the same. AFAIK, autocomplete is provided by bing/azure, mapbox, tomtom, HERE and geocode.earth (I might also be missing a few). Also, mapfit (a pretty young participant, it seems) will have it "in a month", they say.
We used to use Skobbler, which was great until they basically stopped working and went silent.
For the past 18 months, we've used Thunderforest (it's an OpenStreetMap PaaS) and they'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've taken up).
The weird part is that a Firebase plan for one of my side-projects suddenly auto-updated to the paid "Firebase Blaze". The email notification stated : "Your project was upgraded due to activity in Google Cloud"
"A user has set a new billing account for your project in the Google Cloud Platform console. This initiated billing for your project, resulting in an upgrade to your project's Firebase plan."
Issue with that is that I never made such a change. So how could "A user" have made this change?
The resulting frenzy in inspecting admin and user-logs ( and checking if my account was hacked ) just found a new billing entry called "Google Maps Platform Transition Account" that was suddenly linked to this Firebase project.
And I don't even seem to have permissions to inspect it.
It seems it was an unintended consequence of the Google Maps change and many users were affected and confused by it [1]. If you add a Billing account to a cloud project, Firebase will automatically upgrade you to Blaze. Since Google Maps added a billing account automatically to your Google Cloud account, that auto-upgraded your Firebase plan.
The response from the Firebase team [2] was that no additional charges would occur based on this incident, and they've opened an incident report [3] in their dashboard.
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/W on a shitty printer, while I could still use mapy.cz maps while low on ink.
I don't use hidpi, so I can'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).
You don’t need a high resolution display to compare. Save the images, open them in irfanview.com or getpaint.net or other image viewer/editor that can set 100% zoom (with scrollbars). The hotkey for 100% zoom is Ctrl+H in irfanview, Ctrl+0 in paint.net.
Yes, my image viewer can set 100% zoom. But my monitor just displays it exactly like if I did open mapy.cz myself on a lowdpi monuitor, and the labels are thus correctly sized and everything just looks very nice, except for a huge canvas with a need for scrolling.
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't do nearly as good of a job putting interesting waypoints in the right location (e.g. the label for "Prague" or the river name going along the river).
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'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 could navigate the city with a map printed even at that zoom level, but good luck trying to do that with google maps.
That's the single most important point for the map.
I didn'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 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's a theme called OSM Bright that looks good, and when I figure out how to set it up, I plan to switch.
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 have to say the satellite imagery on Mapy.cz lacks sharpness in comparison to Google Maps' satellite view. Google'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'm zoomed in at from your links, better location labels. ie: https://i.imgur.com/yUOlWO0.jpg
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.
I just wanted to add that geocod.io is now a viable alternative to Google Maps for geocoding in terms of both accuracy and pricing.
We’re going to continue having a no-credit-card-required 2,500/day free limit, as well as the most affordable pricing, without restrictions. Including a plan that allows for unlimited geocoding. https://geocod.io/pricing
Full disclaimer: I’m one of the Geocodio founders.
This is pretty insane, I think it's about time that tech companies start to honour longer-term contracts and give more notice, even on their hobbyist service offerings.
I mean, imagine a local grocery store who's rent would go up by 28x, 1 month notice. Or his procurement costs? That means literal bankruptcy or closing down his shop, virtually overnight. That's just not okay, not after years and years of service. You need to honour contracts for at least a year at a time and give notice. You can give two months notice on a 5% price hike, not a 3000% one.
Few other businesses operate in this manner, and those that do we tend to call shady, exploitative, inconsiderate etc.
It's not really the best, though. The article cited to back that up compares Google only to Apple maps and almost entirely focuses on building shapes which add little useful information to the map. Proper street geometry seems more important to begin with.
It's strange they haven'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.
I'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's Here, and Apple Maps, and Bing...but none of them are -serious- competitors.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that has this sentiment.
The day that they enabled part of the new quota system my app stopped working (partially my fault for not reading their email) but it turned out to be the day before Election Day for an election app. I call in for support and they tell me that they are rolling out the new quota system and that I have to pay $10,000 if I need to increase my quota limit before the official new quota pay as you go system launches. After the discussion I find out I’m not even talking to google and it was a google partner. Somewhere down the line google just had a partner call me instead.
Long story short I changed the API key to get me past Election Day. Decided I’m moving off google maps asap as well.
I’m willing to pay but... can’t handle their constantly changing policies, their support was terrible, their ask for $10,000 for a short term slightly increased quota was absurd, their new quota system is too expensive.
A lot of people forget that Mapbox did a similar move with their $499/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/yr. 9 months later it became $25,000/yr.
I have no trust in neither Google Maps nor Mapbox.
I hail from hardware where, for instance, Apple chooses 3 providers for it's SSDs (SanDisk, Samsung, Intel, ...) to shield itself from price gouging, supply issues with any single party, business concerns, etc..
However, I routinely see entire companies based on single providers despite choice existing in the marketplace. The OP should have designed their service around multiple mapping providers from the get go, if a serious business relied on mapping
When developing web apps, it is not possible to write the code for the alternative platforms aswell. We are not just talking about changing tiles but also alot of manipulations with the maps in terms of layers, polygons, routes, markers etc on the map.
What you are saying is already done in places where it can be, for eg, use of ORMs allow the application to be connected with a variety of DBs and your DB queries and application become independent of the underlying DB.
SSDs all have standard interfaces (SATA or whatever), so you can easily swap them out. Conversely, Google Maps doesn't let you implement your own pan/zoom layer on top of their maps API, you have to use their APIs.
Yes you could create a compatibility layer for this, but really that seems like a lot of pre-work for something so unforeseen.
Depending on the SKUs of parts used, a single product (say MacBook pro 128GB ) may have multiple SKUs, i.e. versions of the underlying board, to accommodate for different parts and their dependencies.
If you're under the assumption that Apple and Co don't spend the effort in abstracting out dependencies on their hardware, your deeply mistaken.
A significant portion of engineering in hardware circles is spent in this effort
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'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'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'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/features. The one they offer to embed on your site appears to be a much older version (for instance it doesn't support smooth zooming or 512x512 tiles). There are also TOS restrictions with what you can do with their javascript framework and widgets/API's, for instance you generally can't use other data providers or features from other mapping/GIS services on the same page.
It'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/reverse geocoding, or routing; many solutions exist but most don't really work or are quite difficult to setup (IMHO).
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'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'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.
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/month droplet.
I am having trouble finding a good autocomplete/geo search solution though, curious if anyone has found a decent quality provider or solution you can self host like graphhopper.
Photon is the most popular autocomplete solution. Runs fine on an SSD and there are pre-built database dumps you can download. Obviously OSM's address coverage isn't great, which is always going to be the limitation.
I'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't break any terms.
> 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 "OpenStreetMap API" is only for editing. There is other software in the OSM ecosystem which has it's own API (e.g. graphhopper has an API for routing). But sometimes people get confused and try to use the "OSM [editing] API" for all sorts of things.
> 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 same
2. 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/EU markets first). So getting rid of non-revenue making chunk of traffic doesn't hurt much.
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 "because offering discounts cannibalizes revenue from higher-margin markets." But in this case... you literally know exactly where the user is located.
Yeah, if Google had differential pricing for something that costs them the same to produce, I'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't cost them very different to provide the service.
Some years ago, I worked on a project with a chat between people from different countries and add a Google translate in each sentence. So two people with different languages could exchange a bit.
It was almost ready when Google changed the rules and started charging a lot for the service.
So I learned my lesson, and never again based a project (or a part of a project) on a tier service, because the rules can change too fast and ruin it all.
That what people are experiencing now with Google map.
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.
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's database contains the water features you see at OpenSeaMap.org, but doesn't render them.)
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.
I used to occasionally contribute to Google Maps with edits, images etc. That will no longer be the case. I understand it will not have almost any impact on Google, but the same is true for instance for elections, yet I make the trip to voting urn almost every year.
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/month for my site so I’m looking for an alternative with more attractive pricing options
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. https://www.mapbox.com/maps/satellite/
What did you use to calculate your $1k price/month estimate for your website?
Thanks! The quality is great but I need around 250k 512x512 satellite tile loads per day so 250k / (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?
This price change doesn'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't think so, I think Google owns the data.
I work for a startup who's job is to primarily help people find places on a map (free to users, no ads) so this change affected us by a great extent.
As I'm working through implementing google's suggested best practices and ways to cut down on API calls, it's still quite a shocking realization that each ONE map load (aka any user that loads our site) costs us almost a cent a piece (0.7 per Dynamic Maps load to be exact)
The pricing tiers in this article do not include the additional levels of volume discounts which are available if your usage is high. You need to contact a partner or the google sales team to get details of those additional tiers.
The small fry like these kind of people are not google's real customers - the real customers were already paying to use the APIs before these changes happened.
The free limits before were hugely generous. There is a cost involved in offering the free service. If you weren't paying for it, then google was losing money. If you stop using google for free now because of this, then they actually save money and can now dedicate those resources to supporting actual paying customers for which there are many. Sure individual small users are a drop in the ocean, but multiply that up by many thousands and thousands...
Mapping is commoditized. There are many free and paid-for competitors as the article states. If you want the extra value that google offers and chose to stick with using them, then you need to pay for it now. I dont think that is unreasonable. If you dont want to pay for the service and continue getting something valuable for nothing, then go and leech MapBox/Here/someone else's free limits instead. See how long a small company without google's resources can support thousands of startups hammering their services & infrastructure without any revenue to pay for it.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find the MapBox version to look better and have comparable detail to Google (in these examples anyway), and at ~10x cheaper price, seems a no brainer.
A lot of people is choosing a map because of visual appearance. This is a great advantage of MapTiler, which has a tool where you can with a few mouse clicks totally change the map design, select one of 57 languages or a font for labels[0].
Advanced users can totally change the whole map by switching on/off map elements (schema based on OpenStreetMap tagging)[1] or add own data (MBTiles format - both raster/vector)[2].
There is a support for multiple JavaScript APIs like Leaflet, OpenLayers, Mapbox GL JS (source code snippets in the administration), mobile SDKs (Android as well as iOS) and desktop software development (QT + Unity game engine)[3].
"If we maintained current monthly usage of both maps and Places (ie. location search), the cost of Google Maps would be multiple times higher than the total cost of all other infrastructure."
Well yeah. If Google Maps is the most important component in your infrastructure (seems to be, based on the rest of the article), then it'd be surprising for it to not be the most expensive.
Why not host you own OSM data for Poland and Germany? Just reduce the detail level and unneeded layers and deliver vector tiles. This way you are the master of your own destiny and bear (most) of the true cost of your service without any middlemen to charge usurious tolls. Then just make an annual token donation to OSM for their data services and you are done.
My company went this route. We host own tiles for whole europe, at high level of detail for several of our projects. Thanks to having all data in our own database we can also do geocoding/geodecoding and we've made our own geodecoder (simple postgres query with some some organically grown rules for interpretation of osm data into address). That resulted in 20x faster service for us than from google and just this geodecoding would cost as much as our server colocation (small 8core/32gb machine with 3 cheap ssd in striping configuration).
I'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's data then I don't see Google as being particularly evil in this case, why should they give "the competition" 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've had acceptable results with GeoServer, OpenLayers, OSM, and PostGIS. I've occasionally done proof of concept work with Leaflet, but that's always turned into Google Maps eventually.
MapBox isn't perfect yet but I'm eager to see them deliver on engineering... it's been about a year since I've looked.
I have a native Android app I need to update before Thanksgiving. Right now the map uses Google Play Services. I've done fairly deep OpenStreetMap projects on several websites, but with Android I'm afraid what it will mean to find a Google alternative. What are other people doing there?
Okay. I've read that in a few places, but never anything that seemed quite clear and authoritative enough to really trust it. For instance Google's docs [1] say:
In addition to the $200 monthly free credit, all users get:
Free Maps usage for iOS, Android, and Embed
(for displaying maps only)
But in a section about Dynamic Maps and Street View they also say:
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.
So are maps on Android only free if the user can't interact with them?
What's being missed here is that this is, in some ways, a return to normal for Google Maps. Google only introduced pay-as-you-go Maps API access in September 2015[1]. Before that, you could get 2,500 free per day. If you needed more, you had to sign a $10-20,000/yr enterprise contract. That was it. There was no pay-as-you-go access. If you needed just 5,000 or 15,000 a day, you were SOL. (That's a big reason we launched Geocod.io in the first place, because we found ourselves in that unserved middle of the market.)
It'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's actually cheaper to just go and build your own maps or find a lower cost alternative.
Users at that scale typically have an enterprise plan which is handled differently (you have an account manager rather than using Google's API console billing), and pricing is totally different.
It's been a while since I had a GMaps enterprise plan, though, so I'm not sure if they're bumping the pricing on that side. At the time, the pricing was closer to the new prices they're rolling out than they were to the old API console billing prices.
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 "less than payroll" to "more expensive than our devs".
My question is pointed at companies that rely on Google Maps, not Maps itself. If a company is spending 80% of their cash on HR related items and 20% on miscellaneous infrastructure costs (hosting, Maps API access, etc) with 25% of that misc cost being maps then monthly expenditures just increased by ~23% (and runway decreased by ~19%)
IIRC Google Maps via the iOS/Android SDKs remain free, so theoretically the price increase does not apply to mobile-first X-sharing outfits like Uber/Lyft/Lime/Bird/etc.
I've incurred $30 since the switch for my website. At about $10 a day, I'd have to pay at least $100 a month (after their $200) discount. By contrast, I pay $170 for my server.
I looked at available options, and have been hesitant to switch to another. The article mentions Mapbox's pricing opacity. I tried Mapbox a while ago, to be surprised that map interactions (zooming and loading new tiles) counted as usage. I used up quite a bit in an afternoon of playing around with maps.
I'm going to try host tiles myself from next month. I've embarked on a Rustification effort where I'm seeing RAM and CPU savings by porting some services to Rust. Hopefully I'll have spare capacity to host map tiles.
"Get Country Data (GCD)
A microservice that returns a country's geographical location information.
I developed Get Country Data because I wanted to reduce the amount of costly calls my apps were making to the Google Geocoding/Places API and I wanted to know additional information like currency names, currency acronyms, currency symbols (HTML entities), international telephone calling codes.
The data came out of multiple other projects I was working on. The data is not read from any external source or a local database but rather it's kept in-memory. The code base contains 42 472 lines of code.
Get Country Data is running in Google App Engine on PHP 5.5."
When I looked into mapping solutions for my company, I realized pretty quickly that MapQuest had a much more transparent and easy to negotiate process than Google maps. It was apparent that Google's API, etc. was more advanced, but we really didn't need that (just retrieving an image of directions in one small sub-section of our site), so I'm glad I went with MapQuest-- which is more than adequate for our purposes and has had price DECREASES instead of increases during our time with them. I think there is something to say for going for an underdog, where they are less likely to mess you over, partly because they can't afford to do that.
Seriously, build your own solution based on OpenStreetMap. It's a core project we should all support as we can all benefit from it. Google's model is to build a huge collection of data that is otherwise freely available, and then sell access to it. You can just take OSM data, put them on your own server and embed freely on your website, provided that you credit the project: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ#3a._I_would_li...
For the client library, it'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.
I just got done on the first stages of a maps instant answer for Jive Search using Mapbox and think it'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't take long to get up and running either. https://github.com/jivesearch/jivesearch
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'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.
Wow! I've recently uploaded all my old photos to Google photos to take advantage of the free offering. I guess I should prepare myself for the time they start charging for it.
Has everyone been using google maps on 'internal only' projects? Their TOS has (AFAIK) never allowed free usage for intranet-style systems, only those which would be free and open to the public.
Trying to look at pricing for internal use, it was always insane (starting at $10k/year, IIRC). The price change may make it more cost effective for small internal use cases, at the expense of open/free/public use.
Everyone here is assuming Google is increasing the price to win money.
Considering Google Maps is key in Google's business I wouldn't be surprised if this was actually intended to weed out small companies and only keep the big whales around.
I don't know the numbers but I imagine Google Maps app/web users are by far the largest traffic source. Traffic from projects using the API must be peanuts in comparison.
I would just like to note that while cost is one thing, this is not the only factor based on which we should choose a map. Everyone complains about the huge and sudden increase, so not before long they will lower the prices again and everyone will be happy... and continue to put more money into this already giant player on the market, giving them even more control over it.
The problem I find is that when these alternative services see how many people are leaving Google Maps and switching to them, those companies will then raise their prices to "remain competitive".
Business is business and if they can see an opportunity to make more revenue, they'll do it, whether it be Google or anyone else. It's just a matter of time.
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's GPS to do the same as what Google is paying money for... it could pose a real threat to them. A "crowdsourced" map of sorts..
I think their navigation offering is another strong moat in terms of just plain old maps.
I'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.
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?
Always the same. Especially when TomTom satnavs were commonplace and you had to pay for map updates, nobody could ever find your house if you lived in a new area, or if there were new roads in the area. Recently they built a new tunnel here, it took a few months before friends and family stopped complaining about Google leading them wrong. Meanwhile I use OsmAnd and have no trouble anywhere (when driving in western Europe). Or if I forgot to update my map, then I can still figure out my way by looking at the roads tagged as "currently being built" on my version of the map. OSM really is just power to the people.
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/herself on DigitalOcean, that costs about $40. Doesn't seem terrible even for a startup, either.
Doesn't Apple's map require a developer account which costs money? I haven't used them, but I seem to remember you have to pay to develop using Apple products.
There are many similar usecasess described at https://switch2osm.org/case-studies/ but they all decided to host it by themselves with openstreetmap and leaflet.
A lot of people seem to be aware of MapBox and Apple's MapKit as viable alternatives, but Esri's ArcGIS Online also offers a lot of options for online maps, including allowing users to edit and collaborate on feature data.
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.
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.
I don't get it why they ask for money from people who want to learn their platform. They should be happy more people want to develop for them and charge for actual API usage instead above the free quota.
I don't want to sell anything in the App Store, I just want to display an Apple Mapkit JS Map on my website, but apparently I need a paid developer account for this too, which makes no sense.
Google doesn't care about you or whatever you're building, unless you are building something that might threaten them.
You would be well-advised to reciprocate. To the extent that third-party services are essential to your survival, making efforts to bring it in-house, get long-term contracts, have backup providers, etc. is simply prudent.
Dependency is control. If you build your business in someone else's sandbox, it shouldn't be a surprise that they can hurt you at their whim, and absolutely will do so if they can make a buck.
This is why I oppose "cloud services" at all points unless it's absolutely something we can't do ourselves. The second you start relying on another business for a critical service, you've ceded control of your operation. In house is more work, but worth it in the long run.
Someone you pay to care about your stuff will never care about it as much as someone who works and maintains it themselves.
And the squeeze to shore up revenue continues. It does really hurt to have your business tied to someone else's api. This will continue to damage startups as the big companies deal with eroding search revenue
It means that you're not meant to use their servers to supply your map tiles (basically, image files that cover an area of map). You're supposed to either use one of the commercial tile providers or set up your own tile rendering servers. All the code and data required to produce tiles identical to the ones on openstreetmap.org is open source and freely available so in principle this isn't a big deal. This company just wanted a direct drop-in replacement for Google Maps that didn't require running more of their own servers.
It's not true. Ish. On openstreetmap.org there's servers that render the map data into the images you see. That's run by volunteers, on mostly donated hardware and hosting. There is no SLAs. If you run your big commericial app against that, and cause the load to go through the roof, the volunteer sysadmins will be sad, and will block your app. It's not commerical vs non-commerical. Big non-commerical apps do get blocked for misusing it too.
does anyone know if this development will affect users of MapKit that hosts Google Maps within an iOS app? I've been using Google Maps through this SDK for over a year and haven't heard anything about them charging for the service or being able to track usage as one scales.
from their map comparison seem OSM and Mapbox visually the best and also with the most information, often beating Goggle maps, reason i am using Maps.me in mobile, Gmaps outside US are almost always inferior to other maps
Check out TallyGo.com - SDK works like magic for all things mapping, including turn by turn...way easier to implement than mapbox and way better traffic, road network and turn by turn...cheaper too imho
You're being downvoted, but it'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's paid usage (see also: Dropbox).
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.
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.
I'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'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're pretty certain that they will eventually be fined, but they'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.
I'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'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'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/month 'internet content subscription', it could work in the way that Spotify does.
> The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook
The worst thing about targeted ads is that we're building an insane surveillance infrastructure that the government is already eager to tap into, and will be even more eager if one of our governments devolves into dictatorship.
I'm from East Germany; and while I'm too young to have experienced it myself, the Stasi is still fresh in our minds. What we build today in the name of improved advertisement would have brought tears to Mielke's eyes.
If you're German, then the Snowden documents show that your government is participating in domestic surveillance that it cooperates with Five Eyes on. This is a few orders of magnitude more invasive than what advertisers do.
The Stasi are fresh in no one's minds or you would eliminate this surveillance.
We don't even need to look at the Snowden documents anymore. The largest Internet exchange (DE-CIX) recently lost a court case which tries to get rid of the BND wire tapping.
Are you talking about the refugees? I was wondering if you have any numbers or sources about them setting out to rob, kill and rape. Here in Belgium you hear about them looking for jobs and learning the language and stuff, never actually met a refugee IRL however. It could be entirely possible that they start robbing and raping after they get home from work ofcourse...
>Why can't I just pay the website that as a microtransaction directly?
There have been multiple attempts at offering that. The most prominent is probably the current iteration of flattr [1], but it seems really hard to get people excited for that model which in turn means it isn't worth the hassle of signing up for content creators.
Patreon is probably the closest to a working model, but that means a few people have to really love your service.
Advertising's place is as a vehicle for emotional manipulation and stuffing all available channels with propaganda selling the advertiser's particular brand of product or politics.
Certainly it can also be used to dispense useful information, but if someone is spending money to dispense that particular information, they have an agenda. It might be innocuous, "buy our product!". Or it can be malicious. Either way there is always intent and you cannot separate media, especially advertising, from the intent behind the media and the very goal of advertising is to grab (or accost or steal) your attention.
The internet already has alternate funding mechanisms: the host either eats the cost themselves and pays for it out of pocket, sells something to pay for hosting and other expenses, or users pay the host directly for access. Advertising is just one of at least four options.
Your comment seems like an attempt at emotional manipulation and propaganda for your particular politics. Your argument doesn't seem to reasonably distinguish between good or bad behavior generally.
Can you point to the point where SIIX's wording is seeking to emotionally manipulate you? I think you're conflating "emotional manipulation" with "using words that have emotional connotations" in an effort to build a strawman.
It will likely effect Google more than anyone else. Microsoft and Amazon generally don't make (much) money from data collection. So as far as cloud providers, those two should be safe.
> we would be wary on taking free Google Analytics for granted
It is not free. Your users pay for that with their privacy and Google gets your user's browsing history for free. It is unfair and you should not have used it in the first place.
Their "I am not a robot" captcha is in similar vein. If I am training your machine learning models by manually clicking on pictures, I need access to the trained model.
I have refused to use dozens of service which required me to click pictures to prove that "I am not a robot" and sent the service provider an email informing them of my decision. I would urge everyone to do the same.
This, plus most sites side load content from major CDN's, like ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery and log the requests. You'll need additional extension besides VPN, Private Browsing and uBlock Origin - Decentraleyes:
It's amazing how much you need to break free from tracking, but I'm on the war path :) Btw, taking the red pill will cut you off Facebook and Google accounts, unless you provide real phone numbers.
Matrix movie: "You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes"
Not sure where it falls on your ethics continuum, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between a pre-labeled and unlabled picture in a Google Captcha.
I've started noticing that if you're sneaky you can get a surprisingly large tolerance for error. I've no idea how effective that actually is at poisoning results.
There is an (admittedly a little nasty) part of my brain that really likes the idea that if I'm being asked to provide free labor for a proprietary company, then I'm not really under any obligation to be a great worker.
Just refusing to use the service is probably more effective though.
Good lesson, I'd say. My experience designing big production systems - is not to rely on any third-party for your mission-critical core operation, even if it's harder, you have control.
Google is actually devouring Internet as we speak, like a black hole:
- email. Keeping your own server unblocked by Gmail is a loosing battle. I use iCloud, but it still goes through Google for my Gmail and G-Suite peers.
- Search - monopoly. Analytics - monopoly.
- Android. Try make a phone with open source Android without Google apps and licensing.
- Companies and schools move all its people to G Suite (Google).
Ten years later 'Internet' will be replaced by 'Google' in dictionaries, as it happened to 'googling'. GSP = Google Service Provider (former ISP), GETF = Google Engineering Task Force (former IETF) :)
There'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's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google (sic!):
Looks like many folks who leeched on GM'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: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
> 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?
It seems to me that in simplifying the cost structure, Google has excluded some use cases completely. Enterprise pricing should be as complicated as possible, to closely mirror the actual costs incurred by the service provider.
Treating every map load the same even though one user can move around the map a lot, zoom out till he can see the earth, etc. is not smart. A much better metric is number of tile loads, so that cost corresponds with usage.
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.
Besides that, there's nothing difficult to believe about that experience with google.
And besides THAT, there's a far more trivial method of 'forging' an email - using the devtools to modify the DOM. No need to bust out photoshop at all.
Your accusation makes no sense and is based on almost nothing.
No, it's not subpixel anti-aliasing. It's a completely different font. It looks like Roboto to me, while the rest of the email is written using Helvetica.
DOM manipulation, of course. But not everybody knows about it. So most people default to Photoshop, which is what these people did.
If the email was forged I would expect more occurences than a single letter. This may simply be an artifact of either compression or the font renderer.
There is also a lack of google employees in this thread coming forward to confirm it's a fake.
In the screenshot you can clearly see they blanked out the email, subtle changes in the image may have resulted from this blanking process (for example if resolution has been changed, which I suspect is the case)
Okay this is just ridiculous. Have you tried searching Google for the string that you think is forged?
Try searching for the following, taken from the "fake" portion of the email: "based on your high usage it appears you are eligible for volume pricing discounts, enterprise-grade customer support, and/or offline contracts"
The very first hit is one of Google's pricing pages for their Maps platform:
When do I need an Enterprise account?
Businesses with high-volume usage who are looking for volume pricing discounts,
**enterprise-grade** customer support, and/or offline contracts should contact
us about setting up an Enterprise account.
They've obviously reused text between this page and their client update emails. Now please explain how this fits into your conspiracy theory.
EDIT:
The font used on Google's pricing page is Roboto, which means that the discrepancy is Google's fault as someone obviously did a bad copy/paste job when preparing emails for clients.
If nothing else, you have a good eye for fonts I guess.
If you’re going to manipulate the DOM (typically via the dev console) it seems vanishingly unlikely you’d insert a new span with a different font rather than just overtyping the text.
You misunderstood. I am affirming, they have used Photoshop to insert text in that screenshot, and they have mistakenly used another font, Roboto. It's easily noticeable, as it's narrower, and some glyphs (like that "g") are different.
I'm an employee. It's not my product. I didn't include a link because I thought it would be too spammy. It's tallygo.com.
At this time, we are a mix of mapbox + our own data.
I don't know why you need to sign up to see sample code. I'll give that feedback.
For mapping you'd use it over mapbox because it comes for free with your navigation package. For navigation you'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.
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.
Just as a n00b who thought the fact that I could make these silly custom maps "OMG look the pins are silly things now!" on Google Maps was super cool... I'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'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.
I think this is one of the most important points in the article - the way they handle these pricing changes destroys trust in Google's other business offerings. How can people use Google products and services as a core piece of their infrastructure when they're willing to bump their prices >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't many great alternatives for a long time, due to Google sucking all the oxygen/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.