Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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".

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.

[1] https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ [2] https://github.com/openstreetmap/chef/pull/78 [3] https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com