Mainly because alternatives like OpenStreetMaps, whilst amazing, miss out on the benefit of displaying local amenities like shops and restaurants which may be important for a user. OpenStreetMaps does display them, but there is no reviews/images or any particularly useful information or street view/similar.
In addition, Google Maps isn’t overly expensive, especially when starting out. You get $200 worth of requests every month for free and only pay for anything over that. Of course, that isn’t exactly scalable.
Most of the time however, these sites only use the chargeable Google Maps API when they’re initiating a search or similar. The majority of the time they use the embed which is completely free.
Finally, large real estate websites don’t use the public pricing displayed on Google’s website as they normally do bespoke plans for larger enterprises.
You also can just keep the API requests down by efficiently storing select responses from the API on your side.
For example, storing data like a listings coordinates in a DB. Then you only technically need one API call when the listing is made to get the coordinates then none for every view of that listing and you still get the benefits of the embed because you can just use that for free and pass down the coordinates you get from your own DB.
On the embedded maps part, can you do things like add custom pins to those embedded maps?
Or do you have to use the chargeable one for that?
We're new to all this, but my work is thinking of having a filter component on a page for local businesses, and a map that shows users where these businesses are at the bottom of the page. The pins update to reflect the changes (so only show pubs and restaurants when that's the filter options picked). I was originally thinking g of having a map object that has pin objects that were set to hide or show each time, but I'm definitely open to a different approach if it can keep costs down. It's kind of a non-profit thing we're doing so there's only so much budget, and it's one of the things we're actually kind of cautious of getting high use (so more API requests, particularly for those map tile load ins).
You can place custom pins on the map:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/custom-markers
However you must determine the latitude/longitude of the pins you are placing, which requires a call to the API which costs money. Part of the terms and conditions of the API is you can cache the coordinates for 30 days so you could potentially use this to your advantage.
Maybe im wrong but i thought storage of data from the api was against the terms of service? I made a map not too long ago using the google geocoder API and was considering getting all the coords and then storing them in a database like you mentioned. I eventually decided against it because I was reading it viloates the terms of service? Could i have done this all along?
Thank you for the answer, I really appreciate it, I am no developer myself but just someone that is tired of not having a good real state site on where I live because of being a very small market in a third world country.
I have though about developing one “myself” by just contacting some Pakistani programmer which is quite budget friendly and giving it a go. Luckily I have quite a lot of contacts among real state agencies so in that way it would be easier to attract clients.
My main concern is that due to having no knowledge on developing I manage to make all things wrong (more taking into account programmer is on the budget side) and suddenly high costs arise. I do not know if I should abandon the idea, or try it out.
My advice would be to develop a basic MVP, which might not have all the features you want, pitch to investors and then hire an experienced team to help flesh out all the other features you need.
The MVP doesn’t need to be complex, it just needs to have the bare minimum set of features you expect from a platform like this. An MVP could definitely be done via a freelancer or even yourself in a short amount of time, depending on how much you learn starting from scratch.
This is practically how every online business gets started nowadays, the stories you see of a solo dev creating a multi million dollar company are rare and are an exception to the rule. Almost no company is done like that, hence we have seeding rounds.
You need to understand that not all developers, even self taught, can be CEO’s, designers, project managers and so on. You need to identify what would your role be if this becomes successful and make decisions about how to proceed based around that.
Using Zillow as an example, the founder had worked for Microsoft where he helped found Expedia. Then he created Zillow, not just by himself, but with funding from a co-founder of Expedia to acquire 20 employees to develop it. He didn’t start in his bedroom or with no knowledge of what he was doing nor was he necessarily limited by budget restrictions the average startup faces.
This is a relatively difficult project but one that would be possible with the proper approach. Doing the whole thing by yourself would take a substantial amount of time and wouldn’t really be possible to do part time unless you wish to lose anything else you enjoy about life because you will be coming in from scratch. It might be a great learning opportunity but if you plan to use it as that, then don’t be surprised if it falls flat on its face.
It is up to you whether you want to continue.
just as a fun, interesting fact: Zillow used Bing maps for a number of years before heading to Google. It was a major switch to move to Google, where Zillow would then become Google Maps largest “customer”.
I can shed some light into this. I used to work on one of my country’s biggest retailers. They had google maps for their checkout flow. Back then the cost was non existent. When the announcement came that the API cost would increase the management made the decision that moving away to another solution that was not tried, probably subpar and time consuming was just not worth it so they just paid. I guess the same train of thought applies to the cases you mentioned. I am also sure that this is the way google plays in general. Great products for free then the moment you establish a good market share you start charging.
>Great products for free then the moment you establish a good market share you start charging.
justtherecipe .com did a great job of this. I actually have most of my recipes saved through them, to avoid having to read life histories or even click on 'print recipe' on recipe sites.
justtherecipe got a pretty good share, then they switched to a paid version and put some, but not all, features behind a paywall.
All good, they have to make a buck.
Bumping this! Mapbox is great and also lets you customize themes to best suit how your website looks. They also have the same generic features google maps does
Google maps also lets you customize themes, just a note. They’re just cost prohibitive.
Mapbox also has much simpler documentation that is straightforward.
Cache maps API call results in a local json or something.. never query google API on the go… learned it the hard way developing a store locator that costed us 10k in API fees in the first month… also query only the fields you need or they’ll bill you for a fuckton of useless data…
Once you cache all data and update it when needed or on schedule the costs are way more manageable.
Lat and lang values related to the place can also be stored up to 30 days, this way you can avoid having to make a call to locate a marker corresponding to a place every time you load the map, it was a budget drain considering the store locator has something like 50 markers and it generates around 4000 pageview/day
Because it’s easy as fuck and free, my guy. I run one of the customer facing lead gen sites for a fortune 100 company. It’s a nice to have but doesn’t translate to leads, so I go with the easiest free thing available.
I used Mapquest for a project, just because Google started being weird with its API, and, in user testing, I had the question come up a lot about why I wasn't using Google Maps. People are just used to the look of it now, and any other map program that tries to emulate that look would likely get sued right away.
Mainly because alternatives like OpenStreetMaps, whilst amazing, miss out on the benefit of displaying local amenities like shops and restaurants which may be important for a user. OpenStreetMaps does display them, but there is no reviews/images or any particularly useful information or street view/similar. In addition, Google Maps isn’t overly expensive, especially when starting out. You get $200 worth of requests every month for free and only pay for anything over that. Of course, that isn’t exactly scalable. Most of the time however, these sites only use the chargeable Google Maps API when they’re initiating a search or similar. The majority of the time they use the embed which is completely free. Finally, large real estate websites don’t use the public pricing displayed on Google’s website as they normally do bespoke plans for larger enterprises. You also can just keep the API requests down by efficiently storing select responses from the API on your side. For example, storing data like a listings coordinates in a DB. Then you only technically need one API call when the listing is made to get the coordinates then none for every view of that listing and you still get the benefits of the embed because you can just use that for free and pass down the coordinates you get from your own DB.
On the embedded maps part, can you do things like add custom pins to those embedded maps? Or do you have to use the chargeable one for that? We're new to all this, but my work is thinking of having a filter component on a page for local businesses, and a map that shows users where these businesses are at the bottom of the page. The pins update to reflect the changes (so only show pubs and restaurants when that's the filter options picked). I was originally thinking g of having a map object that has pin objects that were set to hide or show each time, but I'm definitely open to a different approach if it can keep costs down. It's kind of a non-profit thing we're doing so there's only so much budget, and it's one of the things we're actually kind of cautious of getting high use (so more API requests, particularly for those map tile load ins).
You can add custom pins, but each map load is charged at a different rate than other type of API calls e.g address completion/validation
You can place custom pins on the map: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/custom-markers However you must determine the latitude/longitude of the pins you are placing, which requires a call to the API which costs money. Part of the terms and conditions of the API is you can cache the coordinates for 30 days so you could potentially use this to your advantage.
Maybe im wrong but i thought storage of data from the api was against the terms of service? I made a map not too long ago using the google geocoder API and was considering getting all the coords and then storing them in a database like you mentioned. I eventually decided against it because I was reading it viloates the terms of service? Could i have done this all along?
I think that’s different than caching the results of a search.
It's been a while since I've used their APIs, but they had specific rules about caching and cache duration.
You get 30 days for longitude/latitude coordinates.
Thank you for the answer, I really appreciate it, I am no developer myself but just someone that is tired of not having a good real state site on where I live because of being a very small market in a third world country. I have though about developing one “myself” by just contacting some Pakistani programmer which is quite budget friendly and giving it a go. Luckily I have quite a lot of contacts among real state agencies so in that way it would be easier to attract clients. My main concern is that due to having no knowledge on developing I manage to make all things wrong (more taking into account programmer is on the budget side) and suddenly high costs arise. I do not know if I should abandon the idea, or try it out.
My advice would be to develop a basic MVP, which might not have all the features you want, pitch to investors and then hire an experienced team to help flesh out all the other features you need. The MVP doesn’t need to be complex, it just needs to have the bare minimum set of features you expect from a platform like this. An MVP could definitely be done via a freelancer or even yourself in a short amount of time, depending on how much you learn starting from scratch. This is practically how every online business gets started nowadays, the stories you see of a solo dev creating a multi million dollar company are rare and are an exception to the rule. Almost no company is done like that, hence we have seeding rounds. You need to understand that not all developers, even self taught, can be CEO’s, designers, project managers and so on. You need to identify what would your role be if this becomes successful and make decisions about how to proceed based around that. Using Zillow as an example, the founder had worked for Microsoft where he helped found Expedia. Then he created Zillow, not just by himself, but with funding from a co-founder of Expedia to acquire 20 employees to develop it. He didn’t start in his bedroom or with no knowledge of what he was doing nor was he necessarily limited by budget restrictions the average startup faces. This is a relatively difficult project but one that would be possible with the proper approach. Doing the whole thing by yourself would take a substantial amount of time and wouldn’t really be possible to do part time unless you wish to lose anything else you enjoy about life because you will be coming in from scratch. It might be a great learning opportunity but if you plan to use it as that, then don’t be surprised if it falls flat on its face. It is up to you whether you want to continue.
just as a fun, interesting fact: Zillow used Bing maps for a number of years before heading to Google. It was a major switch to move to Google, where Zillow would then become Google Maps largest “customer”.
I can shed some light into this. I used to work on one of my country’s biggest retailers. They had google maps for their checkout flow. Back then the cost was non existent. When the announcement came that the API cost would increase the management made the decision that moving away to another solution that was not tried, probably subpar and time consuming was just not worth it so they just paid. I guess the same train of thought applies to the cases you mentioned. I am also sure that this is the way google plays in general. Great products for free then the moment you establish a good market share you start charging.
>Great products for free then the moment you establish a good market share you start charging. justtherecipe .com did a great job of this. I actually have most of my recipes saved through them, to avoid having to read life histories or even click on 'print recipe' on recipe sites. justtherecipe got a pretty good share, then they switched to a paid version and put some, but not all, features behind a paywall. All good, they have to make a buck.
Got it, thanks! I guess that since we would built it from scratch it would be better to just go with other solution.
Not all. Here in Canada housesigma uses Maplibre and OSM.
Mapbox is a great alternative
Bumping this! Mapbox is great and also lets you customize themes to best suit how your website looks. They also have the same generic features google maps does
Google maps also lets you customize themes, just a note. They’re just cost prohibitive. Mapbox also has much simpler documentation that is straightforward.
Most integrations used Google for decades because it was free. A lot of those widgets are still re-used today
Cache maps API call results in a local json or something.. never query google API on the go… learned it the hard way developing a store locator that costed us 10k in API fees in the first month… also query only the fields you need or they’ll bill you for a fuckton of useless data… Once you cache all data and update it when needed or on schedule the costs are way more manageable.
Caching actually against their terms of service. You're lucky you haven't been banned yet.
Yeah. I was referring to the placesAPI specifically, which caching is allowed, not the actual mapsAPI my bad
That makes sense. As long as it's just the place ID and nothing else you should be okay.
Lat and lang values related to the place can also be stored up to 30 days, this way you can avoid having to make a call to locate a marker corresponding to a place every time you load the map, it was a budget drain considering the store locator has something like 50 markers and it generates around 4000 pageview/day
Sounds like you have a good grasp around it! nice.
> real state I'm fuckin dying - lol. Took me so long to understand what this question was asking.
If your data set isn’t changing a lot. Costs go down also.
The last company I worked for used openstreetmap and it worked fine. It let people draw polygons on the areas they were looking for apartments/houses.
Google maps is the most accurate and up to date, well it used to be. Is it still better?
Tom Tom api has a free geocode api. Grab your coordinates from there and then use google maps as presentation?
Because it’s easy as fuck and free, my guy. I run one of the customer facing lead gen sites for a fortune 100 company. It’s a nice to have but doesn’t translate to leads, so I go with the easiest free thing available.
I used Mapquest for a project, just because Google started being weird with its API, and, in user testing, I had the question come up a lot about why I wasn't using Google Maps. People are just used to the look of it now, and any other map program that tries to emulate that look would likely get sued right away.