
Google maps cut prices by 88% - njx
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57459328-93/google-slashes-price-88-for-using-google-maps-api
======
georgemcbay
$0.50 per 1000 maps is way better pricing than $4 per 1000 maps, yet still a
lot more expensive than using OpenStreetMap even if you factor in CPU and
bandwidth costs to run your own data/tile servers.

Assuming OSM is "good enough" for your usage when compared to Google Maps, I
don't think this pricing change really modifies the decision much for a lot of
people.

This may slow down the tide of those switching over but I don't think it will
reverse or stop it.

~~~
stickfigure
Agreed, this is too little too late.

We're about to roll out a major maps-based feature that we've been working
frantically on for the last several weeks (a yelp-like discovery system for
amateur athletic events). Despite having _extensive_ past development
experience with Google Maps, the price forced us to go with an OSM-based
system (MapQuest tiles + Leaflet).

The surprise? Leaflet/OSM is actually a lot _nicer_ to develop against than
Google Maps. Leaflet is a superior API, and the fact that it's open source
means I'm never left wondering "WTF?" when there is some strange drawing
glitch. I'm never going back.

There are a handful of features that Google Maps provides that OSM does not,
and the quality of the Google geocoder is slightly superior. But for drawing a
map and icons/polygons, scrolling to determine search bounds, etc, OSM is a
superior solution. I would never have discovered this without getting "pushed
out of the nest" by price.

One catch: To do HTTPS, we have to proxy the tiles. No big deal.

~~~
stickfigure
...and now it's deployed. You can see it here:

<https://www.voo.st/>

~~~
white_devil
_"You don't have JavaScript enabled. Good luck with that.

You're probably also running a painfully old web browser. It hurts us to see
you suffer so."_

You might want to tone that down a notch. I'm running Opera v12, but just keep
JS off by default, white-listing sites as necessary.

~~~
stickfigure
Oops! This is one of those things that was supposed to be rewritten but never
did. I guess the lesson is to be more careful about leaving snarky comments in
public-facing copy... you might forget to change it.

Thanks for the reminder, this will be fixed this afternoon :)

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chris123
"Closing the barn door after the horse is gone" is the first thing that popped
into my mind when I read this headline.

The second thing was that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" when
they raised prices in the first place (last October, I guess it was). So they
got like six months of revenue bump, pissed a lot of people off and created an
opportunity for at least one big and viable competitor. Smart.

And now they flip flop.

The message is that if they think they can bend you over a barrel and have
their way, they will. And then, if the competitive landscape changes, giving
you a chance to get their dick out of your *ss, they will try to kiss and
makeup (until they sense their next opportunity to bend you over). What did
idiot Bush say? "Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice..."
<http://youtu.be/eKgPY1adc0A>

~~~
ww520
Google has lost lots of credibility among 3rd party developers using their API
and services with the dramatic price hike with Google Maps and AppEngine. You
would never know when they will decide to jack up the price again.

~~~
angkec
Exactly what I was thinking. First reaction from me was that they will raise
the price again when they gain market share, second reaction was a quiet note
to myself that if they ever drop price on AppEngine like they did to GMap I
shall not go back since my startup was hurt so bad with their vendor lock-in
and dramatic price raise.

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jeffnappi
It's pretty shady how Google muscled out the competition by offering Google
Maps for free after the acquisition of Keyhole. They basically murdered
MapQuest and other "overpriced" solutions only to raise their price to even
higher levels once they had a near monopoly on the embedded maps market.
Clever, but dirty. Certainly this could be considered "evil".

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cs702
Wow. The parties that will ultimately suffer most from this are Navteq and
TomTom, which now charge between one and two orders of magnitude more than
Google for map data.

For car makers seeking to add built-in navigation to their vehicles, Google
Maps is now a much more compelling choice than either of those two companies'
offerings.

(FWIW, TomTom is reportedly Apple's supplier of map data.)

~~~
rmc
They aren't doing this because they want to hurt TomTom & Navteq. They are
doing this because _they are suffering_ from OpenStreetMap, who charges many
orders of magnitude less than Google Maps _even with this price drop_.

~~~
jan_g
The problem with open street maps is that it so much worse than google maps.
Orders of magnitude worse. I love the concept and in theory that concept is
unbeatable (who else but those living in the area have the most intricate
knowledge of roads, paths, etc?). But as of now, it is simply not comparable.
Many features missing, and the data is very incomplete (many streets missing,
missing buildings and street numbers, parks, POIs, ...).

~~~
tedunangst
But OSM can get better, and better faster. I toyed with it just a bit and
fixed a few things myself. Google maps? I filed a bug or two, then _two years_
later they closed it as not applicable.

~~~
idspispopd
With a sufficient critical mass now in or transitioning to OSM, it's trivial
that OSM will get better. If Apple are going to contribute to OSM(which is
likely based on their shared project history) then it's expected to increase
in quality quickly.

However, even without their contribution, OSM is already at a level of
maturity to compete with the bulk of GM implementations. It seems that most
people just need basic location services.

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latchkey
We switched from Google Maps to OSM because they were too expensive. Now that
we are using the Leaflet JS lib, we are really happy with it. Not only is it a
fairly nice API, but it is open source, so it is much easier to debug than
working with Google's obfuscated code. Even with this price reduction, I see
no reason to even consider switching back.

The only downside to OSM is that we needed the tiles served up through https
since our site is always https, but there are workarounds for that. ;-)

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jeffnappi
There's a good discussion on this over at the Reddit thread:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vhj7g/google_sl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vhj7g/google_slashes_price_88_for_using_google_maps_api/)

I found this comment very interesting:

"I'm a developer for a major online brand and finding our locations is an
utterly crucial part of our business. When Google started charging us for
mapping they played hard when coming to a deal to pay for their services. They
spelled out a price and there was no negotiating. The arrogance from anyone we
had contact with at Google was mind-blowing. We quietly re-developed our
location search to use to Bing and pulled the trigger one day. Needless to say
Microsoft was more than happy to have our business and was very helpful. As
far as mapping, Bing is surprisingly accurate and competitive. We've never
looked back. Google wanted over 2 million per year just to show our
locations."

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mgkimsal
about.

damn.

time.

Yes... they'd only recently hiked their prices (last year?) but they shouldn't
have in the first place. I'd priced out using google maps for a service, and
it was cost prohibitive. However, so was bing maps, and getting a firm price
from bing was even harder because my use case didn't fit in 'standard use
cases'. In our case, apparently using a mobile app to add metadata to a
location constituted 'asset tracking', which puts you in to a whole other
level of pricing stratosphere.

I just get the feeling that many mapping apps out there that use
google/bing/whatever are totally skirting the actual real pricing and use case
terms, much like loads of people copy Photoshop. As long as Adobe turns a
blind eye to some level of piracy, it keeps Photoshop top of mind and gives
people fewer reasons to seek alternatives.

~~~
ghshephard
I'm curious why the hostility. Isn't Google's positioning little more than a
simple factor in your decision making process as to which mapping provider you
wish to use? Indeed, I'm wondering why the HN crowd isn't _upset_ at the
reduced pricing, because now it reduces the incentive to use (and contribute
to, improve) OSM.

~~~
mgkimsal
Yeah, it probably came across as a bit hostile, because trying to get accurate
pricing models from various sources was a big pain. Google has/had a lead in
this market because of an earlier behaviour of encouraging open/easy use of
their maps and APIs. Without much warning, they _significantly_ raised
pricing, and now have significantly reduced it, in less than 9 months.

They've lost a lot of credibility, and it's becoming more apparent that the
'do no evil' era mentality there is going away. They didn't drop prices just
because they "listened to customers". If they'd bothered to ask customers
beforehand, they'd have known $4/1000 is just way too much for most users.
Instead, they reacted hastily due to a perceived threat of Apple entering the
market, and probably a big exodus of the smaller players who were using them
before (also known as tomorrow's larger players).

~~~
ak217
I think part of the reason for these fluctuations is that certain divisions
within Google are under a lot of pressure to be profitable. So maybe Maps were
really looking hard to make money because this kind of order came down the
line from Page or whomever (I'm sure that division has a comparatively huge
budget, with their scale of operations on the ground). After which maybe they
realized that the kind of profitability that drives developers away is not
what they were looking for.

The whole "do no evil" handwringing is a bit misplaced here, I think. Google
is providing a service, they're free to set their prices. They're not trying
to sabotage the OSM project, and the api remains free for not for profit use.

~~~
ghshephard
If anything - Google was greatly helping the OSM project by directing so much
energy towards it.

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corywatilo
It's about time. It's nice to see Google is feeling the pressure from other
(relatively up-and-coming) mapping services like OpenStreetMaps and MapBox to
the point where they actually made their prices more competitive. Also I've
worked with several large websites who have moved from GMaps to Bing Maps over
the past few years.

GMaps is great, but ultimately not worth the price at $4/1000, especially for
a small site operator like myself.

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andye
I don't like google more and more...when they didn't feel any competition out
there, they gave you a very high price. And when there are some other choices,
they reduce the price sharply. Why not just give the developers the low price
first?

Take the GAE as the example, if you enable billing, you have to pay at least
$9 a month, no matter how much more you are using over the quota.

Now, Google is not friendly to developers at all.

~~~
tbatterii
GAE is for "big boy" apps not projects for hobbyists. The pricing reflects
that.

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sheff
This price reduction looks like it is only for sites supported by advertising
/ unmonetised sites.

Any startup planning on charging for an app or service which incorporates any
kind of map will still have to pay a minimum $10,000 a year license fee to use
Google Maps, which is ridiculously high as a starting point.

What Googles mishandling of the charging changes has done is to heavily
publicise the fact that the alternatives (mainly OSM) are now good enough for
major companies to switch to without much hassle.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
It's possible to use the free API on a commercial site.

~~~
sheff
I was just going by the "Do I need to use Google Maps API for Business?" in
the FAQ here :<http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/maps-faq.html> .

"If you are charging a fee for access to your Maps solution, whether for a
business or consumer audience, you are required to purchase the Maps API
Premier."

To me this reads as, any SAAS web app which used a Google map anywhere would
be required to pay $10,000 per year plus usage charges.

~~~
zackham
<https://developers.google.com/maps/terms> 10.1.2(a): "You must not charge
users or any other third party any fee for the use of the Maps API
Implementation, the Service, or the Content ... "

You can use it on a commercial site, but the maps implementation must be
available to free users. It limits your options but there are plenty of sites
that are commercial ventures and work within these limitations.

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josephlord
iOS 6 may be a big part of this. They might have preferred to reduce prices to
other customers before but if they offered it to everyone they would have had
to offer it to Apple who may have been the majority of their maps revenue and
it was also a mechanism to add cost to Android's key competition.

Now Apple are leaving anyway the difference that the price cut makes will be
smaller (in absolute terms) and it will not harm Android either.

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rmc
Good to see OpenStreetMap starting to really shake up geodata.

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JiPi
I wonder if will affect Geocoding limits too?

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/#Limits)

~~~
JiPi
"if it will" _

~~~
ThePherocity
You can edit a post ^

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zackham
Wow this is fantastic news. We are in the process of shifting some of our
usage to OSM (and will likely continue) but this makes GMaps a reasonable
expense now.

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PatrickL
We developed some webbased application using Google Maps and before going in
beta, had to change to OSM because of change of Google's pricing structure (we
simply cannot afford the 10.000+$ API Premier license fee). But we are
hopelessly stuck with OSM are not able to determine the exact location based
on address details. Is anyone interested to help out for a few hundred $ ....?

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joeblau
Thank goodness! I made a speed trap tracking (vroomtrap.com -- graveyard)
program a while ago that never got off the ground, but when I heard about
their price increase, I was dumbfounded. All in all; I have been pretty amazed
by Google's new "monetize everything" initiative.

Glad to see that competition from OSM and others is keeping them in check.

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bojanbabic
I hope they will do same with appengine prices. I'd be willing to return if
they had more reasonable pricing.

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jpb0104
This doesn't seem to affect their Enterprise prices does it?

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danielrm26
Someone's afraid of iOS 6 Beta 2.

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Wajeez
A bit too late?

