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Radar Maps Platform (radar.com)
152 points by aleyan on Sept 26, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 80 comments



You had me until this pricing page: https://radar.com/pricing?type=consumer

I'm interested in the address autocompletion in particular, but you guys don't want to tell me how much it's actually going to cost apparently.

I also have no idea what a "monthly tracked user" is or how it's relevant.

LMK when you drop the "Contact Sales" aspect.


I came to write exactly this comment, specifically I wanted to check what the pricing for forward geocoding was, as I've got a very significant monthly Google Maps bill for geocoding and if Radar gives results which are 95% as good as Google's at a cheaper price then I'd be jumping


Hi, there are much more affordable geocoding options: https://opencagedata.com


why do so many people rely on Google for this? ArcGIS is vastly superior and much cheaper.


ESRI is as evil as Google (if not worse). If pricing is the only consideration, maybe ESRI is the way to go, but I would take other aspects into account, too (e.g. walled-garden signals, tricking customers, software-lock-in).


Would love to chat. Worth considering best solution given tradeoffs: Cost, coverage, customization options, enterprise-readiness


I believe the point is that Op doesn't _want_ to chat. I believe the originally point is you should be up front and _clear_ with your pricing rather than trying to force a conversation.


Yep, I get it. Working on a self-serve pricing calculator. Reality is that enterprise convos do make sense at sufficient scale. If it does here, our inbox is open!


You get that they don't want to chat but circle right back around into 'our inbox is open' lol

Odd


Often, if a company has "Contact Sales" on their pricing page it's because they only want customers who have a budget big enough to warrant contacting sales.

At an early stage, it's often easier and more lucrative to build for and support a few large customers than many small ones.


Yeah I understand that, I was just amused at the extent to which the guy was convincingly impersonating a half-bright chatbot


Pricing page could def be clearer. Working on it! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37668919


Was hoping for some sort of interesting synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mapping service like Capella Space. Instead got more adtech APIs :/

Why did they name themselves "Radar"?


As someone who used to work at an ad tech company, I can tell you that we're very much not an ad tech company. In fact, we set out to build the opposite. More here: https://radar.com/blog/our-commitment-to-privacy

Short, easy-to-spell name that suggests location. It's worked out pretty well for us, and we got the dot com!


> name that suggests location.

Not really.


You might want to take a look at this: https://github.com/ngageoint/sarpy


What's the terms on your forward geocoding? Many providers have terms that require live lookup of address->latlong, no caching permitted. My client's use case has long-lived addresses that may need to be mapped many times, and currently we're paying for one of the only geocoding services that permits us to persist the coordinates involved.


> and currently we're paying for one of the only geocoding services that permits us to persist the coordinates involved.

I'll ask blatantly: Which one is that?


Hi, we allow you to store geocoding results as long as you like: https://opencagedata.com


Our standard policy is that you can cache responses for up to 30 days: https://radar.com/documentation/maps/geocoding#caching


> Licensee shall not … store any address or point of interest data from Radar's geocoding, autocomplete, or place search APIs for more than thirty (30) days;

So if an e-commerce site user starts typing their address, it’s autocompleted via Radar, and the user confirms it, then the site must delete the user’s address after 30 days?

This seems wrong.


*crickets*


Thanks for the reply. I was reading docs but missed that somehow.


Not sure if I missed it, but how do you calculate address completion request? I mean, Google let me pass a random key for every Word I type and charge me once. Do you have something similar? Or each letter counts as 1 request?

Thanks for this great Project!


Pricing is per API call right now, but we're planning to add "per session" pricing in future.


Radar CEO here. Welcome any questions or feedback!


As an OpenStreetMap contributor I really appreciate the proper attribution you have in the bottom right, rather than hiding it behind a button like Mapbox and some others do - thanks!

https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-OpenStreetMap


There’s no attribution that I can see on the second embedded map on the page (on mobile). A honking great Radar logo, but no OSM attribution.

This trend of “our branding takes priority over the required attribution for the free map data we’re using, but hey, they’re a little nonprofit so can’t afford to sue us” really ticks me off. Mapbox started it as a calculated move, and since then others have followed claiming it’s “the standard”.

But in this case I’ll assume good faith for now and hope it’s fixed. A simple “© OSM” would be fine.


Should be showing a collapsible ⓘ button on very small screens. We'll take a look and fix.


The map isn't visible on my devices.

I have a pihole on my network and the "stock" block list contains api.radar.io

The list https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...


Their geofencing API seems to advertise tracking users. It seems to provide some kind of metadata storage alongside a geofencing API. My guess is that some websites are tracking their users though this API.

I haven't dug into it much further, but if their API is used for tracking, it should stay on the list.

Edit: looks like they provide a dashboard to follow the location history of any user using their API. Yeah, no, I'm adding this to my personal blacklist just in case.



That's a pretty aggressive list...


Hi! I maintain that list and its variants.

The list is for people who don't want to be tracked by third parties. That's who we serve, and that's why we do what we do.

Based on this...

https://radar.com/pricing

... note the "tracked users" feature, unless I'm missing something, this isn't going to change.


+1, didn't work for me either. There's dozens of us!


Here to say the same. Thought it was borked on mobile, but I'm guessing it's pihole.


why is radar blocked..


My guess: https://radar.com/product/geofencing

> Best-in-class accuracy down to 5 meters

> Open-source SDKs with smart presets and customizable tracking options to maximize battery efficiency, responsiveness, and accuracy.

> Add geofencing to your apps with confidence. Visualize and debug every location update and geofence event with Radar’s dashboard.

Looks like this is used to follow the location history of app/website users on a map in the backend.


Not familiar with this list, but I'm guessing overly aggressive blocking of location APIs. More on our approach here: https://radar.com/trust


No idea, api.radar.io is on the block list since January 2020.

The commit's comment is "major update from adaway.org"

https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts/commit/4fa0470


Would you consider an API for “style your own basemap” with your vector data?

I sometimes find myself caring about if the basemaps look good and fit my use case more than the API cost.


Potentially! We're still big fans of Mapbox for highly styled maps. We've just found that Mapbox and Google are overkill for many of our customers.


The maps are based on MapLibre (Mapbox fork) so any valid Mapbox style can also be applied.


The example map of New York on the linked page has rather odd labeled places and street names. At the default zoom, it’s marked up as if New York, Hoboken, Weehawken, etc are literal points marked by tiny circles. This is particularly silly in the New York area, which is a continuous gridded metropolitan area.

Then, when zooming in, you have to zoom very very far in before street names show up. This makes a map zoomed slightly less far in mostly useless, because you can’t tell where you are. I realize that people mostly don’t navigate by map any more, but if you are literally selling map tiles, presumably mostly not tied to the end user’s GPS, then whoever is looking at the map would like to know where they’re looking. For example, in Manhattan, the actual useful coordinates are the cross-streets, and the map is not very helpful without the street names.


Appreciate the feedback. We're working on showing the right level of detail at different zoom levels for the different map styles. cc @kocheez75


How does your POI database compare to Google's?


Google is the gold standard, but our coverage is quite good in the US. We incorporate a mix of open and commercial datasets both for POI and address data.


How would you say you measure up in Europe? How about compared to Apple?


Still pretty good in Europe, but more of a gap. International coverage will be a priority in 2024.


How much is this compared to Google maps?


More details in the post, but Google starts at $7 per 1K map loads and $5 per 1K geocoding API requests, whereas Radar starts at $0.50 per 1K for both. We've roughly been helping our enterprise customers cut their maps bill in half.


How can you afford to be 10x cheaper? Google being overkill?


Google raised prices by 10x or 20x a few years ago, if I remember correctly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17570029


You can charge a lot when you're #1.


Hey that is a fantastic price. I'll check it out, thx


I was actually looking into options for maps, geocoding and routing for a freelance thing that I'm doing and this actually seems great! I might go with Mapbox for the already started project, but will probably use Radar for at least something in the future.

The other options I considered were Mapbox and MapTiler, since it seems that actually self-hosting everything yourself is a bit demanding on hardware resources. I mean, I love that you can get the OSM dataset into PostGIS pretty easily, but getting the vector data or raster tiles to the client can take a bit of CPU power and bunches of storage! I wonder whether I missed any other good cloud services, or a self-hosted stack that would make things easier.

That said, I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data. I guess you can cache both and vector data is actually less storage intensive, but at the same time pretty much every vector map implementation lags badly on my phone and sometimes even a bit on my netbook (Radar still lags for me, although less than Mapbox, probably because Mapbox does the whole fancy 3D globe thing with fog and stuff).

Either way, major props for making this exist and pricing it so competitively! Would be cool to also fix the attribution text that's on the lower right on desktop but doesn't show up on mobile, at least for me.


For a self-hosted vector tile stack you can have a look into https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler I found it very easy to get started and when you know the other stacks it is also very fast to create these vector tiles even for planet-scale.

(note, that I'm not affiliated with them, but they use some source code from us for the efficient import and also contributed to GraphHopper, but this did not influence my experience ;) )

> I wonder why so many seem to be moving away from raster tiles to vector data.

The flexibility of styling. And you can easily serve customers that need different default languages. This makes maps also more accessible for countries without Latin alphabet. Also when you rotate the map (like for GPS navigation) the labels can rotate too if necessary.


You might also want to check out https://felt.com/ (also OSM-based).


We are big fans of Felt!


But not actual RADAR maps, with weather and aircraft returns.


Stay tuned...!?


or SAR imaging, because that would be cool.


Geocoding is certainly _much_ cheaper than other providers.


as cheap as ArcGIS, which is vastly superior. But kudos to this project


Out of curiosity, why do you think it's vastly superior?


This looks cool, but the pricing isn't exactly clear. Website says $0.50/1K API calls and then the HN title says $0.50/1K map loads. Is a map load === 1 API call?


The link says:

Maps: $0.50/1K map loads. Geocoding: $0.50/1K API calls

Halfway down the page under "Cut your maps bills in half" heading.


A map load is what it sounds like, an API call is a geocoding/search/routing API call. Pricing starts at $0.50 per 1K for both. Pricing page could be clearer, we're working on it!


Wow. I just hacked together a geo coding api myself for a project using postgis. Wish I’d seen this.


What's the policy for attribution and saving copies of annotated maps for distribution?


Can you share more about what you're hoping to do?


I used to work for a company that made an app for drafting evacuation signs, and we had a usecase for using a map as an underlay to show the surrounding buildings/terrain for the siteplan. I recall that quite a few map providers had a TOS that prevented that usecase (as the evac signs would be saved to pdf for distribution or printed), so I'm interested what the take is here.


Am I the only one who thought it was some aggregator for weather radar data?


What does it mean for a map to be vector based?


Old but good post on vector maps vs. raster maps from our friends at CARTO: https://carto.com/blog/raster-vs-vector-whats-the-difference...


I believe it means vector-graphics based.


Do you have a static maps api I can push some geojson to draw over?


A static maps api that produces an image of the relevant vector tiles is on the near term roadmap (next 1-2 months). Can you say more about the geojson drawing part?


Not Something1234 but also interested in a feature like this https://docs.stadiamaps.com/static-maps/#example


Check out HERE for great pricing




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