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Submission + - Developers seek an alternative to Maps API after Google increased the price

Jiri_Komarek writes: A lot of web developers will be slammed by bills from Google from July 16th for using Maps API on their websites or in apps (https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/pricing/). Every website using a map and having more than 800 visitors a day must pay now. The price of the extra map views increased by 1400% — so popular websites get bills in thousands of dollars each month. Therefore developers start searching for an alternative.

MapTiler Cloud (https://maptiler.com/cloud/) offers them complex tools which include base maps for a different use case like car navigation, outdoor activity, background map or for displaying business data or store locations, easy-to-use customize tool, hosting for own geodata, basic satellite and geocoding service or other utilities which Google Maps users are used to. Therefore MapTiler Cloud was chosen by many developers and big companies like Bosch, IBM, Airbus, Starbucks, KFC, Burger King and many others.

While there is a number of other map providers, they either provide just limited services or their price tag is much higher than MapTiler Cloud. The difference between the prices of MapTiler Cloud and Google Maps can be seen in this table
(https://www.maptiler.com/google-maps-platform-alternative/).

The search for an affordable alternative is visible on a number of registered users on MapTiler Cloud. “Since Google announced the pricing change the number of our users increased by 200%”, summarize Petr Pridal, head of the MapTiler team. “We expect more people to come as they get their first bill from Google. We are ready to accommodate much more visitors worldwide thanks to our scalable server infrastructure.”.

Google reduced the free plan from 775.000 to 28.000 map views a month — so every popular website needs to pay for maps. As they use the billing method known as pay-as-you-go, many developers will receive an invoice based on a number of the web visitor. The price for an extra thousand map views also increases from $0.5 to $7. Moreover, even the free plan users will be asked to insert their credit card details.

For users migrating from other map providers, MapTiler Cloud offers pre-generated source code snippets for most popular JavaScript libraries like OpenLayers or Leaflet which can be directly pasted into websites. It also supports multiple mobile SDKs for Android and iOS, development of desktop software and games.

The migration is smooth because the developers can easily re-create a map style they were used to. This can be done by a simple, but powerful customize tool, which completely changes the map look by choosing just five colors. Moreover, they can define other map properties like the font or one of 55 supported languages.

Another advantage of MapTiler is the option to host data on own servers, which is important especially for institutions working with sensitive data like the military. By using a vector tiles technology, the space required to host a world map is just 60GB, which is a bigger USB stick and the digital map can be used in devices without an internet connection, for instance in airplanes.
Apart from map hosting, MapTiler platform (https://maptiler.com/) offers other integrated tools for working with geodata.

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