I've used SimpleGeo since I met Joe Stump at Foo Camp. I was talking about my early stage iPhone app, Kliq which needed reverse geo coding and a few other basic location features. He suggested SimpleGeo and I got started quickly–though each of the features I used I was ready to rebuild on my own when the time came, rather than pay the as-then rather large monthly fee were I to be so lucky to have so many users.

It's been bumpy, even with relying on them scantly–I had hoped the feature set would grow and mature to take even more work off of my hands. Instead–several times the API changed from under me without warning or backwards compatibility and my alpha app simply broke. Once, embarrassingly in an investor presentation, another time it took a personal tweet to the founders to get things re-sorted out.

I'm sad that for so much money, such a great team, excellent visual design, hot shot investors etc. they didn't take off. I wonder if they just didn't hit on the right business model–for me it seemed I am something of a YCombinator gamble for them: they want my startup Kliq to be reliant on their services such that I can't or don't want to rebuild at scale (wasn't the case), price such that they take money from me Kliq now, as small developer team with little time to build cookie features not core to my app (they didn't charge us a monthly fee until the very very end, while we probably would have paid $5-$20 a month right away and up to $50 with more features), and price such that they "exit" with Kliq if we do end up scaling. Then they just need some success stories and they would have been too. Some ideas as a now former "customer".